


Before There Was Them

by cosmic_interference



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Emo Ben Solo, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Loss of Virginity, Pining, Slow Burn, Young Ben Solo, Young Rey, the sort-of Flipped AU no one asked for, there will be so much pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2020-09-01 20:57:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20264407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_interference/pseuds/cosmic_interference
Summary: Briefly, he thumbed through the pages of his worn journal. He couldn’t seem to throw this one away. He couldn’t because he got it in one of the class Christmas parties their brilliant teachers thought to do. The only good thing that came out of it was that Bazine Netal was his secret santa, and since the whole class knew he liked writing more than he cared to admit, she gave him a journal.He carried it around with him but didn’t tell anyone, hiding it in his bag securely under his many textbooks.Today was the day.He was going to sit with Bazine Netal at the cafeteria.





	1. Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Hello~ obviously, I can't focus on doing just one thing and am now writing sort of like a Flipped AU. Idk where this idea came from, really, only that I love Flipped so much, have watched it so many times, and read the book to boot. 
> 
> If you're still here after reading what is essentially _the most_ cliche trope ever, then join me in this journey of Rey and Ben Solo self-discovery. Be forewarned, it's gonna be soft, kinda angsty and definitely a slow burn. 
> 
> Special thanks to [nite0wl29](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nite0wl29/profile) for the amazing moodboard! To my lovely beta, [clymacs](https://clymacs.tumblr.com/), and to the amazing [here4thereylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/here4thereylo/profile) for being the bestest Middle School AU consultant ever! I owe a lot of these chapters to you. She's just new to writing fic so please give her work, ["The Choice"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169280) some love! <3
> 
> Edit [08.30.19 || 10:45AM]  
Mood Music for this chapter: ["Coming Home"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTrKkqE9p1o) by Leon Bridges

Today was the day. 

He had to breathe a little extra this morning, rethink his decision once more before going down for breakfast. 

Today was the day. 

The day that lanky, dark-haired Ben Solo was going to finally make an effort to sit beside the resplendent Bazine Netal at the school cafeteria. No one knew, of course, not even his best friend Poe Dameron, or his _ acquaintance _ Armitage Hux. (He read somewhere that it was the right term for someone you hung out with but didn’t let read your diary—sorry— _ journal _). No one. But he was going to do it anyway. Briefly, he thumbed through the pages of his worn journal. He couldn’t seem to throw this one away. He couldn’t because he got it in one of the class Christmas parties their brilliant teachers thought to do. The only good thing that came out of it was that Bazine Netal was his secret santa, and since the whole class knew he liked writing more than he cared to admit, she gave him a journal. 

He carried it around with him but didn’t tell anyone, hiding it in his bag securely under his many textbooks. 

Today was the day.

He was going to sit with Bazine Netal at the cafeteria. 

* * *

When you watch someone enough times in something as monotonous as the school cafeteria, you get a read on how they move around the space. Naturally, he knew that every time during lunch, Bazine Netal would sit down at the table at the very center, on a row where no one would dare bump her shoulder or the shoulders of any of the members of her posse. He knew about the shoulder thing because he tried it once, but not in the cafeteria.

Bazine Netal laughed at him in a mocking tone and her little gang bracketed her so he would back off but he didn’t know why he still liked her anyway. Why he would still feel tongue-tied when Bazine Netal gently snapped her fingers in front of his face when he spaces out in class. 

He didn’t really want to get into why he was reacting to her the way he was, that was much too difficult to analyze. So he’d think about Bazine in general, write about her arms—he loved her arms for some reason. They always looked so soft and supple. And her lips, of course, but that led him into rabbit holes about his budding sexuality he did not want to think about. 

His mother always told him it wasn’t nice to think about women that way. 

So he pored over her memory the only way he knew how—through mostly shitty poetry. 

_ Shitty, _ he knew, but they were _ his _poems. He refused for anyone to tell him otherwise about his own emotions. Though they were mostly about Bazine. 

_ Okay, enough rabbit holes for the day _. 

He stood up with such force just as he watched her sit down. Poe jostled beside him. “Buddy?” 

“I’m going to do something,” he answered automatically, taking his tray and mechanically moving on his annoyingly long legs to her table. The posse didn’t see him approach but he knew Bazine did. She was wearing the same shit-eating grin she wore when her little birds warded him off. She was so beautiful it broke his heart that he could not have her. 

But maybe that could change. Maybe, just_ maybe. _

“Hi.” He said, voice feeling foreign. 

The two other girls noticed him then, and stood up to try and push him away from Bazine’s side. His heart thundered in his chest as he watched Bazine hold a hand up calmly. 

“Hi, Ben!” She said as the two girls sat back down, reluctant. 

“Hello. Can I sit here?” He gestured to the empty space beside her. 

That was another thing. No one dared to actually _ sit _ with Bazine Netal, not in the bleachers, not in the cafeteria, which was why when he briefly distracted himself to scope Poe Dameron’s face out in the room, he didn’t feel much better when his friend’s face was frozen in horror. 

To his utter surprise, Bazine gestured for him to sit down. The plastic felt unnervingly hard in his ass and the air around the cafeteria slightly stuffy even though it was cloudy outside and some of the windows gaped open. 

He watched Bazine’s fingers hover over his tray, like she was picking an apple to eat for the day. And she did. Pick the apple. 

Ben swallowed as he watched her bite the red skin, his ears growing hot. Her fingers were so perfect, too. He didn’t know how to describe them, only that they were so dainty he’d ask her to hold a lot of things in the palm of her hand just so he could watch her fingers curl around it. 

She flipped her black hair. It smelled of sweet cookies. 

“What brings you here?” She asked, setting the apple down on the table. The bitten part stared at him in the face. 

“Uh… I just wanted to… get to know you.” 

“Get to know me?” 

“Yes.” _ If that’s okay. _ He wanted to add, but didn’t know if that sounded alright. What if she refused? Don’t women like forward men? 

“Why? Because I’m interesting?” 

“Because… you’re… beautiful.” He cursed how desperate his voice sounded like. But she giggled, the same giggle he came to love a year ago when he first realized he liked her. 

She flipped her hair back with one hand, smiling effervescently at him. “What makes you think I find _ you _ interesting?”

He blinked at her, at her beautiful lips, at her beautiful neck, and followed the flick of her manicured finger to Mr. Rogers just coming into the cafeteria. 

“That’s an interesting guy, Ben,” she said almost dreamily. “This,” and then she turned to him to gesture at his slouching form. “Is not.” 

Her friends were laughing now, showing teeth, shoulders rising and falling like they didn’t care that what Bazine just said broke a piece of his heart. 

“I thought maybe…” he tried. Bazine raised a brow, still smiling, laughing, _ at him _ . “Maybe I _ could _ be—“

“You_ could _ be? With those ears? Do they even work? You don’t seem to look like you understand what I was saying.” 

Before he could ask, Bazine stood up from his seat, the sounds of their laughter interspersed with his name made the churning bile of rejection in his gut rise through his throat. 

Poe tried to meet him as he headed for the cafeteria door, but his journal burned through his jeans, aching to be filled with angry poetry and the tears that came with usually writing them. 

* * *

He found himself beneath the bleachers as class let out, furiously scribbling and scratching in Bazine’s name over and over again harshly on the paper. The poem he wrote was beautiful, pained, but beautiful. If only he could show her what she was missing. 

He looked at himself, at his odd, bony and too-long fingers, remembered the ears she’d pointed out so easily, ears he knew stuck out so much he hated them, too. He cried some more about that, finally deciding to just stay seated here until a teacher came to ask him to leave for home. 

Perhaps Lady Luck was looking down on him; because suddenly, Bazine appeared before him, perfect arms, perfect legs, perfect eyes staring at him softly. He forgot how to speak—but she solved that by resting a hand on his tear-streaked cheeks. She laughed at that, too, although this time he couldn’t read the intention. 

“Benny,” she cooed and it was like someone punched him in the chest. Her _ voice. _“I’m sorry about earlier.” 

She swiped a tear with the flat of her thumb and let go, shaking her fingers as she let his face go. 

“I got carried away when I saw Mr. Rogers. But you’re also kind of… cute.” 

Cute was what you would say when you found that a dog in the park rolled over for attention. Cute was preschool children asking adults questions that flustered them. And Ben Solo did _ not _ want to be called cute. 

But as Bazine crouched down somehow still so elegantly and smiled at her cheekily in a head tilt, he knew he was still pretty much a goner. 

He’d take “cute” any day if it meant Bazine would touch his face longer. 

“Listen, maybe you could wait for me tomorrow? In front of school?” 

“Why?” This was his chance. He couldn’t believe it actually worked! 

She giggled and Ben’s naïve mind could already hear wedding bells. “You’ll know tomorrow, I promise.” She pulled back, still smiling. “Seeya!”

Bazine left him in awe of her wherever she went, and even now, he was too hypnotized by her swishing hair and her graceful gait to notice that another figure had taken up residence beside him beneath the bleachers. 

“Who are you?” He turned to the intruder, who wore a striped polo that looked like it had seen better days. Her hair was gathered in the messiest ponytail he’d ever seen and her nose was dusted with freckles, although he couldn’t see some of them because there was a band-aid on the bridge of her nose. 

She wasn’t wearing a uniform so Ben looked around to see if maybe she’d slipped through the school gates. No one seemed to be chasing her down, though, and the way she flopped on the sparse grass gave him the impression that maybe she’d done this here before. 

Still confused, he asked again, as she spread out some pencils, erasers, and what looks like a sketchpad with yellowed pages. “Who are you?”

“You know she’s gonna use you, right?” She said instead, sketching something in the said sketchbook. 

Ben felt annoyed. If she’d been standing close by for a while now, she must have seen how tender Bazine had been when she came to him. “What? She just apologized to me.” 

She hummed. “You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

She changed the topic once more, this time catching him completely off-guard. “Are you the one tacking notes on the art room corkboard?” 

“What— yes.” 

She beamed at him. “I like your emotions.” 

“Emot— what the _ fuck _ are you talking about?” 

She tsked, waggling a finger and sternly replying to him in a pitchy voice. “Maz said that word isn’t right! The drunkards in the pub always used that word. Are you a drunkard?” 

“I— no, I’m not. But that’s not the point!—”

“The _ point _is, Bazine will make you do her bidding from this point forward. She’s going to come over your cafeteria table and command you to do her stuff, conjugate her verbs for her, solve for x for her, and even—“ she gasped. “Chew her food for her! Like a bird baby!” 

“Whatever!” He stood up suddenly, forgetting that he was under the bleachers. “Fuck!” 

“You said it again!” 

“Whatever. You’re weird!” 

“Bye, Ben!” She waved enthusiastically and that was when he remembered: he hadn’t given her his name. She knew anyway, but he didn’t know her. This sunny little girl now so small under the bleachers as he walked away, looking like she hadn’t a care in the world. 


	2. Feeling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bazine‘s toothy grin greeted him when he looked back at her, “What a weirdo.” And then she leaned into his personal space conspiratorially, her hand partially covering her mouth. “Don’t even get me started on that outfit. Is it even an outfit? It looks like she stole her clothes from a dumpster.” 
> 
> Ben laughed at that, perhaps because he was wondering the same thing. Not the dumpster bit. Just the part where Bazine said what many in the school was already probably thinking about her. What _was_ up with that outfit?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been paralyzed by that content drop. Which is an odd thing to say, especially after I wrote _furiously_ immediately after it. If y’all haven’t seen the trailer and now happen to see it, I think you’ll understand what I mean. 
> 
> So, I’ll be updating my two multichapter WIPs today because I’m still super pumped and will continue to be pumped until December. In the meantime, I know we are all back to speculation mode with all our cute tin foil hats on (TFA Reylos, how we doing?!) so here’s some fanfiction to tide us by then! <3
> 
> Special thanks to my beta on this chapter, [canelle-allechant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cannelle_allechant), who recently just got an AO3 account! Thank you for taking the time to look over this chapter!
> 
> Edit [08.30.19 || 10:54AM]  
Mood Music for this chapter: ["She's so Mean"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8WLa6umgdw) by Matchbox Twenty

Ben fussed over his hair like he was going to prom. There was nothing wrong with looking ahead, of course, and so he filled his early morning haircare shenanigans with thoughts of how Bazine might look like just a few years down the road. 

Still pretty, his mind provided, and he’d be the luckiest guy because he’d be there beside her, surely, twirling her around on the dance floor like the princess she was. 

But alas, his hair would not cooperate. So he rinsed out the gel that he’d tried to incorporate in his hair (though he never incorporated _ anything _ in his hair up to this moment) and swore when he saw he was going to run late. 

_ No way in hell _. He told himself, pumping his legs furiously to get to school. Blessedly, the exact moment he got to the front of the entrance, Bazine was ascending the stairs. She was such a picture of elegance, her dark hair flowing behind her and steps so dainty and calculated that she looked more like a model. 

Her smile brightened his day, while she gave him the breathiest, softest Good Mornings he’d ever heard — before shoving her bag in his hands. 

“Carry this for me, won’t you? It’s very heavy.” 

He obliged cheerfully, offering his arm for her to hold, but her friends came squealing over from the other side and Bazine went to greet them. 

One of the girls eyed him curiously, in a way that made Ben feel like a zoo animal. But Bazine’s thousand-watt smile chased away his insecurities and soon, he was trailing behind the three girls. 

He didn’t mind, especially since Bazine threw him a glance everyone once in a while. He might just be nodding but this was already more interaction with Bazine than he ever dared dream of. And the bag wasn’t that heavy. If he was being honest with himself, he’d carry everything for her if it meant seeing her smile. 

He grinned as they entered the room for first period. After Ben set the bag on Bazine’s desk, he turned to her slowly. 

“There you go. It’s not that heavy.” 

She seemed to like that, tapping his left bicep. “Thank you, I’ll be needing your help every morning from now on, alright?” 

Dopey, he nodded, buzzing with joy as he sat in his own seat as classes began. 

He hadn’t gone surfing before, though it was something his grandfather always talked about. But if he could get up on the board and not be afraid of the burning sun searing his pale skin, he thought maybe the high he was feeling right now might just be like surfing: looking over the deep blue with heart-pounding excitement. 

Geometry lessons droned all around him but he could see nothing, just beautiful black hair, and beautiful black eyes reminding him of that high again. 

But before Ben could tail Bazine after class, Poe Dameron popped up in his line of vision. He looked up. Poe’s face was unreadable, his thick brows meeting the middle. “Why does Bazine keep looking at you?” 

Ben looked around, nodding to himself and grinning. Slowly, he reclined in his seat and shrugged. “She likes me.” 

“No, she doesn’t.” 

He sat back up. “Why do people keep saying _ that _?” 

“Because it’s _ true _. Wait— what do you mean ‘people’?” 

He thought about her again, that girl. The one who had the gall to look like she didn’t care about anything other than that stupid sketchbook. “The one who doesn’t have a uniform.” 

Poe fell quiet. “My dad said that was Mrs. Kanata’s daughter.” 

So that was why she mentioned the pub. He was such an idiot. Oddly, he remembered what she’d called his word use: drunkard. He winced internally. That would have to change if he was going to be around a beautiful lady from now on. 

“What else did your father say about her?” Did anyone know why she didn’t have a uniform? And why did she always look like she was wearing the same thing? Surely there were other clothes in her closet. 

Poe shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t listen. Let’s go play at my house later!” 

Ordinarily, he would say yes. It was the routine. But the routine could take a backseat for now; it was Bazine time. “Maybe next time.” 

“Ben. Ben, I know Bazine is like _ the _ only thing in your mind right now but—and he’s gone. Wait up!” 

Ben could care less. Gym classes were the best, it was the perfect time to moon over Bazine in her element. 

* * *

Bazine was somehow more beautiful when she was playing volleyball. Something about her handling a ball in her hands made his whole body shiver. Even though he himself could not play a single game well enough to save his life. 

After being conked on the head and arms too many times , he’d decided to just sit it out. It was unbecoming. There were a lot of things Ben wished he was, and one of those things was _ sporty _. Which he wasn’t. 

Bazine, though, she did it _ so well _. 

It was one of the rare moments he’d see her hair tied up in a bouncing pony so that her high cheekbones were in clear view. She was sweaty from the physical exertion that she had already done and it was evidenced in the way a slight red blush bloomed just beneath her skin. Poe was back, this time with a more cautious gaze. He must have figured out that if he said one more thing about how Bazine’s attention to Ben was fake (it _ wasn’t _, they were just jealous and spreading lies), Ben would never hear it. 

In the distance, he spotted _ her. _That girl; the uniform-less little renegade who had the audacity to presume what Bazine’s intentions were. She stood, still garbed in much the same way. 

What he didn’t know, for the life of him, was why he felt like he was so… endlessly fascinated by her. Only in the past few hours, he’d thought about her more than he cared to admit. 

There was something about her eyes and their shifting colors; something about her face that always looked like it knew a whole lot more about a whole lot of things no one else knew about. There was something about the curious way she dressed, too, and how, though her obviously dismal wardrobe clearly rotated, Ben never saw her in the uniforms of the school. 

He wondered why that was, but not before he found himself standing up as he watched the volleyball hit her squarely on the head. 

Trills of laughter echoed in the gym as Bazine and her friends traded jeering looks. It didn’t sit well with what he’d been taught. No one should go out of their way to shame someone even though they wanted to. His mother was very adamant on that. 

But as he looked on — to the girl who had just collected herself as though nothing had happened — he felt like a jerk for staying in his seat and not doing something. Bazine would need him here, surely? If the girl could stand up and walk away, then that meant she was fine, right? 

He tried not to think about it too much as Bazine neared, tried to let it fall away as the girl of his dreams sat beside him to drink some water. 

“Did you see the way she just.. walked away?” Bazine chuckled, flipping her hair on one side and dabbing a towel on her neck. Ben’s words died in his throat and he suddenly could not remember what else it was he’d been thinking before she came. 

Bazine blinked up at him, expectant. “Well?” 

Ben blinked back. “What?” 

“That girl. We hit her and she just… walked away. Did you see?” 

Right. His eyes landed on where he last saw her but she was nowhere to be seen. He frowned. ”Yeah.” 

Bazine‘s toothy grin greeted him when he looked back at her, “What a weirdo.” And then she leaned into his personal space conspiratorially, her hand partially covering her mouth. “Don’t even get me started on that outfit. Is it even an outfit? It looks like she stole her clothes from a dumpster.” 

Ben laughed at that, perhaps because he was wondering the same thing. Not the dumpster bit. Just the part where Bazine said what many in the school was already probably thinking about her. What _ was _up with that outfit? 

“Maybe she can’t afford the uniform.” Ben wondered aloud, only to immediately regret it when Bazine’s grin became wider. “I mean—“

“Are you saying that she might be… poor? Because if she is, then why is she here?” 

He knew what he did was wrong deep down. But he ignored it anyway, especially now that he felt like they were having an actual real conversation since she asked him to bring her bags this morning. So he locked away the guilt that came with talking about the girl behind her back and shrugged. 

“I don’t know.” And because he was an idiot, he added, “Poe said she was Mrs. Kanata’s daughter.” 

Bazine’s eyes bulged, her plump, soft lips stretched over rows of white teeth. _ Disbelief _ , her wide grin said, _ drama _. “The bar owner?”

“Yeah.” 

“Oh my. A bar girl.” She laughed, shaking her head to herself and standing up. “What do you think she does there? Serve drinks to sleazy old men? Or…” The quirk in her brow told him she was thinking nothing good. It chafed at him, he had his very Christian mother to thank for that impulse. 

He never really liked them, but he was suddenly so thankful Bazine’s lackeys came up to her before he could respond to her open question. Quietly, he stood beside Bazine, listening to one of the lackeys rave about something he could easily tune out. 

Maybe he could find Poe. Or go to the bar himself. But he was underaged. Would they even let him in? 

Blessedly, Poe had also jogged away from his side of the court. Ben decided to meet him halfway. Poe looked behind his taller friend at Bazine, still animatedly chuckling with her friends. She was leaning in her friends’ faces, too, and Ben tried desperately not to think about what they were talking about. 

It was the guilt that prompted him to say to Poe, “Let’s go somewhere.” 

He beamed. “Alright! You change your mind about the game?” 

“What? No. I wanted to check on something.” 

Poe visibly deflated. “What’s that?” 

“Mrs. Kanata’s daughter. I want to…” What does he want to do? Know her? “...see why she wears the same stuff.” 

“You know you could just ask her, right?” 

He couldn’t, though, not now that he felt like he’d already wronged her by saying something about her he couldn’t confirm himself. He took another look to make sure that Bazine was out of earshot. 

“We’re going to Kanata’s bar.” 

Poe snorted. “We’re _ minors _, Ben. Are you going to tell me you’ve got a McLovin’ ID in your pocket or something?” 

Ben ignored that, mind already running logistics for this new plan. “After school. We wait until she leaves and then we follow her.” 

Poe blinks once. Twice. “Like a stalker?” 

“No! It’s just for investigation.” 

The other boy laughed, shoulders rolling and the beginnings of a strong jaw growing lax. “For a girl who doesn’t wear a uniform? That’s a bit much.” 

Ben was getting frustrated. He just wanted some answers, really, on the hunt for some sort of odd atonement at a sin he was determined the girl never found out about. “Will you just— after this, next week, I promise we’re playing that game you want, I promise.” 

That seemed to light Poe’s whole face up and pretty soon, he was excusing himself to get his bag. Ben had his own commitments, waiting for Bazine’s attention to fall back on him. When it did, he excused himself to leave with Poe for the next class and Bazine just gave him a small nod. 

He just hoped no one would call the cops on his brilliant idea. 

* * *

Hiding in the bushes to, quite literally, watch someone who didn’t know they were being watched made Ben feel not unlike a sex offender. 

Beside him, Poe was scratching at his arm, annoyance crumpling his face and wrinkling his nose. His brown eyes gleamed with the same irritation as he whispered to Ben, “You couldn’t have picked a girl to stalk that lived in an upscale neighborhood?” 

“Shh, and it’s _ not _ stalking. But keep quiet, there she is.” 

Sure enough, there she was, wearing a different shirt this time. It had been 10 minutes since Ben and Poe saw her enter the bar, and now she was wearing an entirely different shirt and some shorts. 

“Holy shit,” Poe said under his breath. “You think she lives here?” 

“That’s ridiculous. Why would she live in a pub?” 

“My Uncle Johnny owned a pub. His house was on the second floor.” 

She was taking out the trash, they realized, the black garbage bag big in her small hands. It was kind of cute. Poe hummed while Ben counted and checked the patrons gathering in front of the establishment for additional clues for, as Bazine had put it rather crudely, whether or not she served these sleazy customers with drinks herself. 

But the people seemed to genuinely know her, smiling to her and making what looked like small talk. One even helped her dump the heavy garbage bag inside the bin. Poe groaned one final time before stepping back and extracting himself from the bushes and Ben had to pull him by the arm to drop back down when the girl began to turn her head in the direction of the sound. 

“Fuck.” Ben muttered, slowly peeking his head to see if they’ve been caught. 

Mrs. Kanata was out of the bar now, having ventured out at some point to greet some of the customers. And Mrs. Kanata was not one to mess with. So when she boomed from where she was standing, Ben and Poe had little choice but to show themselves. 

Ben’s eyes were immediately on the girl’s face, drinking in that same freckled nose, those same stunningly color-shifting eyes — and felt nothing but shame. So much for self-atonement. 

“What are you boys doing there?” Mrs. Kanata asked with a scowl. “You’d best be going home.” 

Poe was the first one who answered, nails still frantically scratching at his elbows. “We were just lost, Mrs. Kanata.” 

The look on her face told Ben she didn’t believe that. She let it go anyway. The girl was still looking at him and so was he, he realized, neither of them strangely able to look away. 

“Go home then, Dameron. Or I’m calling your father. You too, Solo.” 

As they left, Ben watched an expression cloud over the girl’s face. He couldn’t read what it was but all he was able to think about was how it was probably because of what he’d done. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After working out a few kinks for this story, I realized that it's so plot-heavy, wow. So I hope y'all are up for that! And prolly a little weirdly, I might bump down the rating only because I feel like it might interfere with the vibe of the story. Still thinking about it, though! xx


	3. Tender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He didn’t realize how enamored he apparently was, too, even though she never noticed he was there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my beta [lovingreylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeaceBlessingsPeyton/pseuds/lovingreylo) for helping me out with the edits in this chapter! 
> 
> Mood Music for this chapter: [“Do You Love Someone”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4jYyUCqUOk) by Grouplove and for the ending, some sweet [“Honesty”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZKSuxqHjhc) by Pink Sweat$

The Alderaan People of Christ church was nestled in a quaint little section of the town. It was built at the center because one of the priests who began to run it realized having a Christian community was crucial to many who lived in Alderaan. 

Each one who attended the services was automatically someone Ben already knew. Theirs was a medium-sized town, small enough that there was only one church but big enough that Ben wouldn’t have to worry about dating a distant cousin. And since it was the only church in town, his parents insisted that there was more of a need to look presentable. 

If not for his persistent mother, Ben would have just attended the service in his most basic apparel of choice: a black hoodie and black pants. His mother would never let him hear the end of it, though, he knew because he tried once, when Leia Organa insisted she get to the church first because there was a big event that day that she had volunteered her help for. 

His father, Han Solo, held no such beliefs in proper clothing in church. He was still the same free spirit Ben’s mother met years ago. But the button-down tucked in his pants and the brown suit jacket screaming 50s dapper was indication enough that his mother had also gotten under his skin. 

Which was probably why Han was the unofficial rebellious streak top condoner of Ben’s decisions. Maybe he was living vicariously through his son’s hardheadedness but Ben wasn’t complaining. 

He remembered that humid afternoon when he reached the low front steps of the church and cowered under the stern gaze of his mother. He was taller than her that was for sure, but Leia held such a strong countenance that no one dared to meet her eyes in a glaring match. 

“Ben, what did I tell you about proper church clothing?” 

He had feigned ignorance, shrugging. “That it didn’t matter because God loves us no matter what we look like on the outside?” 

“Say that _ one more time _, Benjamin.” 

“God… loves us no matter… what we look like… on the outside?”

Suffice it to say, he left those porch steps faster than his mother could reach for his flopping jacket hood and drag him home herself. 

There was no more talk about appearances or God loving them when they reached the church this time. Ben was in quiet misery instead, trying not to let it show how itchy and hot he felt under his tight collar, how annoyed he was that his mother had insisted he comb down his unruly hair. His ears only stuck out when he did this, which would otherwise be _ bearable _ if the elderly members of the church would just stop drawing so much attention to it. 

It felt like there was no end in sight for the homily. Ben just wanted to sleep in his bed and daydream about Bazine all day. Unfortunately, there was no way out, not when he was bracketed by his father to his left and his mother to his right. 

Left with no other choice, he looked around the church instead. At the off-white vaulted ceiling he remembered loving when he first came here, the pews that always looked like someone was polishing them every five minutes, the slanted windows high on the textured walls and the giant, very ancient ceiling fan rotating languidly above them. There were tables off to one side clumped together with monobloc chairs piled on high for when the church had other events. There were some people scattered around standing by the posts. 

They were the sleepy crowd, Ben thought, those who went to church on Sunday even after tiring Saturday workdays, trying to stay awake for the homily. The great wooden doors led into the nave all the way to the modest high altar before them at the center where a lone wooden cross stood watch. This building had matroneums once before, as Ben looked up and estimated where they would have been if a storm back then hadn’t blown them out. 

All in all, it was a beautiful church, humble and elegant at the same time, coming together at an intersection of grace, simplicity, and functionality. 

But what he loved the most lay at the heart of the building, the renaissance-style portrait at the center of the aisle just before the steps to the apse—a big depiction of Jesus on the floor beneath them. It was a big, vibrant painting, looking entirely too polished that it gave Ben the feeling that it was somehow infused in the marble floors. The reds and blues always fascinated him, the swirls of color perfectly matching the ethereal endless chasm of Jesus’ eyes shone in almost every modern-day image of him. 

Ben was not on the same level of faith his mother was but he always lived by the belief that if something was beautiful, it deserved to be justly appreciated. 

He peeked from his seat to the painting in question — and to his utmost surprise found _ her _ again, sitting cross-legged atop the painting with the same sketchbook in her hands. She was quiet, her face open and filled with such naked wonder that even Ben could see it from where he was sitting. 

And she just sat there, this slip of a girl, eyes trained on the rose window above the altar that had seen better days. A portion of her sketchbook lay open and hues of warm reds and fuschia told him that she was probably drawing the same rose window she was looking at. 

Just like his first encounter with her beneath the bleachers, no one stopped her or ushered her out. Always, she was in a state of wonder about all things; always willing to let her guard down to look at everything around her like she was seeing it for the first time. 

_ If something was beautiful, it deserved to be justly appreciated. _

If nothing else, Ben supposed they were on the same side when it came to the beautiful things in the world, connected by the strings of wonder Ben liked to think they both had. She was just more upfront with her tantalized appreciation, more unabashed in her naïveté. 

Ben didn’t even want to think about what he did to her behind her back, the way he implied to Bazine of all people about what this girl’s life might be like. How he had gone out of his way to _ stalk _ her (Poe _ was _ right) and only make a fool out of himself in the process. 

Possibly even hurt her, too. 

At the same time, he could come up with no answer to the fundamental question in his head that screamed frustratingly at him: why did she matter so much to him? She was not someone he had interacted with before and their first encounter had been unpleasant. So why was it that as his eyes followed her as she stood, sketchpad pressed on her side, he could not think of anything other than her?

* * *

After the homily, Ben was only so glad that he could finally pop the tight button around his throat open and muss his dark hair. He never understood why his mother wanted his ears to stick out so much. Didn’t she know it was embarrassing? One of his classmates had nearly called them satellites once when he washed his hair after gym class to get rid of the sweat. 

Having them so freely exposed to the church now was not any better. 

He stole away to the grassy lawn in front of the church, finding a place to sit until his mother and father finished talking with some of the members. He brought his journal with him everywhere he went, so he began scribbling his thoughts down to pass the time. He was thinking of giving Bazine a poem to commemorate their first week together, not that he would ever say that to her face. It was embarrassing and he already sounded so lovesick in his poems, he didn’t need that kind of pressure in his real life. 

_ She who was blessed with flowers adored them. She was a picture of tender, juvenile elegance; tan skin and plump pink lips the hallmarks of her delicate _ _face..._

Face? Or was there another word for that? _ Visage! _

..._ tan skin and plump pink lips the hallmarks of her delicate visage. _

_ When she laughs, the angels high above talk amongst themselves about it’s song-like quality and urge her to continue. When she looks at me, I can only describe the heart-pumping moment as surreal; pungent and harrowing at the same time. As though to be blessed by her eyes is also the best way to make me feel unworthy. _

He was about to write the next sentence when ear-splitting squeals cut through the air all around him. Looking up, he saw her once again, seated on the other side of the wide lawn and getting absolutely smothered by children. He spotted little Michael in there, Mrs. Holdo’s three-year-old, tugging a lock of the girl’s chestnut hair, and little Annie by her knee saying something to her with her big, blue eyes. 

All the while, she laughed, gently disentangling Michael’s stubby little fingers from her hair with gentle coos. His fingers came off slowly and Michael bounced as the girl told him something. Soon, he was sitting on one of her thighs, listening with rapt attention to what the girl was saying. There were at least six kids around her now, some he knew and some he didn’t. 

He watched as she held up her sketchpad, patting the grass to detect where she set it down before she was swarmed by this small horde of energetic toddlers. 

She flipped through entire pages and dazzled the kids with animated storytelling, wildly gesticulating hands only making the kids’ eyes widen as she went on. 

One of the kids jumped back after the girl suddenly leaned forward to surprise them and the little boy beside him promptly burst into tears at the same time. 

The girl chuckled, setting the boy on her thigh down on the grass to pick up the other crying child. He sniffled and he thrashed in her arms but the girl remained still, standing on her feet to bounce the boy slightly in her arms. 

The act only incited in the small crowd a jealousy that had them all clinging to her legs in an attempt to be carried, too. And soon enough, she had to set the boy down after he stopped crying, turning her attention to the rest of the small pack of rowdy children before her and tapping her chin playfully. 

He still couldn’t hear what she was saying but he watched as her mouth moved, as her smile grew wider for every word she said, and how that same smile sent the children into a fit of giggles. 

He didn’t even realize how sad he suddenly felt when it was over. When it came time for the parents to collect their kids and for the girl to wave them goodbye one by one. 

He didn’t realize how enamored he apparently was, too, even though she never noticed he was there. 

Han Solo came within his line of vision within minutes, or, rather, came to stand by the girl he had been looking at for he didn’t know how long. 

Did his father know her? If so, why hadn’t _ he _? No one told him about this girl, it seemed, and now she was taking up residence in his head. 

He told himself it was just because of the guilt that he felt this way. He would atone for talking behind her back and it would all be alright. He would finally stop thinking about her. 

Han looked up from the girl, waving an arm to call Ben’s attention. He stood up much too fast, clumsily dropping his notebook. He picked it up hastily with strangely shaking fingers. To try and hide it, he jogged over to his father and shoved his hands in his pants after tucking his journal in his back pocket. 

Up close, she was smaller. He never really stood beside her before but now that he was, he realized she was small enough that he could almost see the top of her head. Her arms were slender, wiry, strong and sturdy-looking as they peeked out of her shirt sleeve. The Band-Aid across her nose the first time they met was long gone and the odd squeeze in his heart when he finally saw those freckles made him sweat. 

She stood shuffling on her feet but her face was impassive. 

His father spoke up, addressing the girl. “Tell Maz I hope she’s doing well. Haven’t dropped by for a while and just wanted to check up on an old friend.” 

The girl smiled and Ben likened it to the way the clouds parted when the sun shone after the storm. It lit up her whole face. 

“Sure thing, Mr. Solo.” She was responding and Ben felt his mouth gape open slowly like a fish because he just couldn’t _ say something _ before she added quickly, “I have to go now. Gotta help with the customer rush.” 

“Even on a Sunday?” 

“Unfortunately, vices don’t go to church.” 

Han eased into a throaty chuckle. “You got that right, kid.” 

Ben smiled. It was small. _ So she’s got a smart mouth. _ He tried not to think about why that only served to continually pique his interest in her. 

“I’ll make sure Maz knows you wish her well. Goodbye, Mr. Solo!” 

Han smiled, nodding his head once, and Ben could do little else but watch her walk away once again. Far away from him. 

His father tapped his shoulder after a long moment, looking at him with an unreadable expression. If he asked now, Ben wasn’t so sure he could field questions about his interest in this girl. Thankfully, the look on Han’s face passed and in its place was traded a slow long-suffering sigh. 

“Let’s go home, Ben.”

* * *

Poets drew from real life. It was true. So when he began writing beautiful words to a different muse, he told himself that was just how it worked for those of them who felt more acutely than others. 

It was just residual guilt. Nothing more. 

_ There was once a girl. _

_ She was small and she was tan and her eyes sparkled like the sun. Her heart was soft and tender, her mind unlike any other. There was nothing in the world she seemed to want but the warm invitation of a humbled kind of innocence that called to her — which she in turn reciprocated. The kind that was willing, this innocence, to be seen; the kind that was pure because it wanted to be. Because it relished an air of ignorance, it reveled in it. It celebrated it’s ineptitude and used it as a pillar of strength. _

_ So that when it came time for the frissons of excitement at budding growth to resound, a foundation built on the same kind of innocence could flourish into something greater. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henlo! o u o I am back with the softness! And will also shamelessly plug my other pure Angst fic [Tearing At The Seams](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20445092) if you love crying over our space babies.
> 
> Anyways, I hope you loved this chapter as much as I loved writing it! <3


	4. Bar Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For now, he ignored all of it. With his journal on his desk illuminated by the lamp, he thought about her. If his family were the type to not make a big deal out of anything pertaining to women and his possible relationship with them, maybe he could have asked his father about the girl’s name. 
> 
> He looked at the title line of the open page and cringed. 
> 
> _Sunflower._
> 
> He didn’t know her name yet so this would have to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know half of it is probably just me, but I haven't gotten this many comments on a fic I'm technically just starting. I have you guys to thank for that. I am so glad this story is as satisfying to you as it is for me. :D
> 
> Thank you to my beta, [lovingreylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeaceBlessingsPeyton/pseuds/lovingreylo)! 
> 
> And yes, this is also dedicated to the lovely Miss Mar. <3
> 
> Mood Music for this chapter: [“Fluorescent Adolescent”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma9I9VBKPiw) by Arctic Monkeys
> 
> PS. I just listen to a lot of Arctic Monkeys for this fic in general because it sounds like what adolescent Ben would be listening to. o u o

By midnight, Ben had painstakingly come to the conclusion that she interested him. 

In her own odd, unguarded way, she made him trip over words and forget entire sentences until he had the chance to write them down. Adolescent shame, in his opinion, was more lethal than regular shame—and admission to that emotion meant Ben would have to admit that he’d done something wrong. 

Which he would, he reminded himself. At some point, his foolishness would come back to bite him in the butt and he could only hope that in case it did, it won’t hurt too much. 

For now, he ignored all of it. With his journal on his desk illuminated by the lamp, he thought about her. If his family were the type to not make a big deal out of anything pertaining to women and his possible relationship with them, maybe he could have asked his father about the girl’s name. 

He looked at the title line of the open page and cringed. 

_ Sunflower_. 

He didn’t know her name yet so this would have to do. In his mind, the nickname made sense; she was bright and cheery in the way he wasn’t. It was the perfect fit. The plan was to write down all the things he knew about her if only so he could maybe piece together who she was as best he could. Of course, there was the question of_ why _he was doing this. Sunflower was just one of many students in his high school. He could wake up one day and totally forget about her. 

Unfortunately, that day was not today. 

So, he settled in. 

_ Daughter of bar owner Maz Kanata. _He wrote it in the first bullet. That was the most obvious. He had to go through being a stalker to know that bit, the blank and disapproving look the girl gave him still haunting his mind. 

_ Artist, _he added next, a fact about her he came to realize must be integral to her as a person. The few times that he saw her, she always lugged around the sketchpad he first saw her use under the bleachers. Ben had a feeling it would only make more appearances in the future, hopefully when he was nearby.

_ Lives above a bar. _Or did she? It occurred to him that he never really bothered to ask. Would it be inappropriate to do that? 

He shook his head, the curly fringe of his hair flopping and getting into his eyes. He pushed it back, annoyed.

Perhaps it was time for a change of tact. There were a lot of things he didn’t know about her and at best, these were just speculations. Baseless preliminary speculations. And so he decided to just describe her as he saw her, drawing from the few times they were in each other’s orbit. 

_ She has freckles on her nose. _Ben was loathe to admit that something in his heart tugged when he first noticed them. 

_ Child-friendly. _Why did he make her sound like a 3-and-up toy?

_ Diligent. Holy? _

None of it made sense. Huffing, he let his pen roll to the side of the desk, the colorful plastic of it hitting the little wicker wastebasket. Half of his room was already drenched in creeping darkness and the heavy blanket of sleep threatened to take him under. 

He left the journal open just as he lumbered over to bed. 

* * *

Ben Solo was not athletic. 

Usually, when a ball came hurtling at you with a speed that could induce a concussion, you’d think people would find a way to dodge to safety. Not Ben I-have-zero-athletic-ability Solo. And so, he stood there, distracted with his chest directly on-target. 

It prompted the very caring Coach Steve to pull him out of the game and send him to the nurse's office as soon as possible. He kept telling them there was no way he’d have fractured ribs from the impact but Coach Steve only believed him once the nurse cleared him.

He thought, sure, the _ outside _ of his chest was cleared. The inside was a different issue. This was what he got for fixating on freckled noses until he fell asleep dreaming about them, palpitating when he saw them again in the English class they shared, and thinking about them in the middle of gym class, mere seconds before collision. 

The upside was that the girl wasn’t there to see him. He didn’t know if he could take seeing her presence among the cluster of students who gathered around him as he fell inelegantly on the hardwood floor. The downside was that, each time he convinced himself the night before that writing some things down about her would hopefully get her out of his system, it didn’t work. 

It only ticked him off to think about it. His rationality, apparently, was taking a vacation, because Ben knew intrinsically that he had to come clean at some point before shit hits the fan. He just didn’t know how to. 

How do you talk to someone you’ve hurt without them even knowing? Wouldn’t she be better off not knowing? And why was all this so hard in the first place? His parents never informed him it was going to be this annoying to feel simultaneously adrift and trapped in a box, as though the fierce struggle of youth was so insular it didn’t notice the wide-open doors. 

Ben thanked his lucky stars that at least Bazine would be in his next class and he’d get to spend some time with her, so he focused on that instead.

He’d probably sit beside her and watch her while she listened to the teacher’s lecture, or maybe she could ask him for a pencil or whatever—like they do—and he would be there, ready with a sharpener to boot. 

Realistically, the chances of that happening were vanishingly thin. It was one of the things about Bazine that endlessly fascinated him. Bazine always came to school packed with everything she needed. She wasn’t straight-laced like many in the student council. She didn’t do it for some semblance of order. She just did it. Ben never saw her borrow anything from anyone—and she never lent anything either. 

As much as he hated to admit it, the possibility of Bazine ever playing out a stupid fantasy for him was about as probable as Chemistry finally being interesting to him. He hated Chemistry. 

Talking about atomic theory never failed to assault his mind with facts he was sure he didn’t need. He would never find himself in the grocery one day, buying cold cuts and answering questions about John Dalton. 

Writing was easier. Words were his friends. Writing his emotions down was the easiest thing in the world. Perhaps that was why he began those lame art class notes. There was no one to share his thoughts with and so, on that one balmy afternoon just before he was about to leave for home, he tacked his first snippet up on the corkboard. 

On the pink post-it, he wrote: _ A saccharine-sweet evening, my muse; let us watch the world pass us by. _

He’d intended to use that particular line in one of his poems but it seemed to be too disconnected. It seemed like it didn’t match the prose he’d written thus far, all of which were odes to Bazine. This one was an outlier, a stray thought unconsumed. 

Ben continued to do them.

Which was ironically a breath of fresh air for him. A stray thought was a stray thought, after all, easier to pay it no mind than to dwell on it. 

It was just his luck, then, that he found one of his ‘thoughts’ stuck on a desk. A yellow post-it bearing a simple sentence he knew he wrote not so long ago. _ No one’s quite like you, really, I don’t know why. _

Just as quickly as he saw it, his classmates came rushing in, hips and thighs bumping the side of the table so that the gust of wind carried the piece of paper. Were they just lying around here? He drew himself up to his full height to see if he could spot where the paper landed. 

It was gone. 

Bazine whirled right in on the desk beside him and he smiled, completely forgetting about the post-it. None of her friends shared Chem with her so he was only so glad to be able to interact with her. She was beautiful today, as she always was. Her hair was in a bun in a hairstyle he couldn’t name. Her black hair was braided and strung around on the back of her head so that it looked like an upside-down halo. The delicate strands on the side of her face kissed against her high cheekbones lazily in the low draft of the classroom. Her lips were only slightly pinked with lipstick while the rest of her face was left bare. 

She looked at him with a slow turn of her head, eyeing him up and down. She grinned slowly, the sharp points of her teeth peeking over her stained lips. He wanted to kiss them, but he blinked that stray thought from his head. 

She trained her eyes forward, her feet moving underneath the desk to adjust her posture on the seat. This was Bazine; without so much as a hair out of place, she dazzled. She enamored crowds with her beauty and made it look effortless.

“Hello, Bazine,” he said, willing his heart to calm.

She spared him a glance. “Hello.” She replied, coldly. That was alright. He was used to it. It was nothing to worry about. 

“How was gym?” 

She shrugged. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t come back for gym class. How was the game? Did you, uhm, have fun?” He asked, not knowing what to say but anxious to keep the conversation rolling. Thankfully, she indulged him, though the coldness was still there. 

Bazine looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read before answering his question. “Yeah.” 

“Okay, okay, good. It’s good that you had fun.” Inside, he was wincing. Years of writing poetry and he could never really translate that skill into actually talking to people. 

Before he could ask again, Mrs. Williams hurriedly entered the room, setting a book down on the desk before greeting them. As the first sound of chalk on the chalkboard filtered in his mind, Ben started doodling. He wasn’t very good at it, not really. It just gave him something to do while the lesson began. In no time, he became so engrossed in scratching out a rudimentary scenery around the margins of his notebook that his mind drifted into coloring options. The scenery was of the field beyond the classroom windows. The lines were messy and there were certain spots where the ink sputtered a little bit. 

He really should bring better pens. 

The black and white of it works well with the somewhat gloomy feel he got going on, but a part of him wanted to try and incorporate some color. Like the girl did. 

He was only half-listening to the lesson, although that was enough to pick up on a particularly strange mumbling beside him. At first, it was so low that he thought it was Sam on his left side chanting Gregorian cult words again, but after a cursory glance to his side, he noticed it was coming from Bazine. 

On the chalkboard read ‘Postulates of Dalton’s Theory’ in capital letters, and Bazine was muttering some words along with Mrs. Williams, interspersed with low, almost self-amused chuckles as well as additional commentary here and there. When she swung her head self-consciously, Ben angled his head to the side, careful not to be caught. She just slipped back into it when she thought no one was looking, and she only continued when Madison in the front row was called for recitation about Dalton’s theory and the three laws of chemical combination. 

“All atoms remain unchanged even when in compounds. Law of conservation of mass,” she muttered almost absently to herself. 

Mrs. Williams then started discussing magnetism—at least he though she did—and sure enough when she went off about the attraction of opposite charges, Bazine mumbled, “Coulomb’s law.” 

It became a pattern. She would mutter a name or a fact—Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, “cathode rays travel in a straight line”—and cautiously looked around for anyone who might have heard her. 

At some point, Ben should have known she was going to catch him looking. And she did, right as she was finishing up a factoid about Eugen Goldstein’s work on canal rays. Her face turned sour the very minute she saw him and left with no other choice, Ben erred on the side of honesty. 

“You know all these people?” He asked. Bazine feigned innocence, but the mask had already been lifted when she thought no one noticed her. She _ did _know these people. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she countered, straightening her back on the chair. 

Ben would not be deterred. It was amazing to him how she just blurted out information like that. It was so unlike her, so different from the girl he was used to. “Baz, seriously, that’s amazing.” He said, and it was the truth. Bazine must have sensed it because the defensive mask she used was softened around the edges by a niggling bashfulness. 

It was shortly chased away by her scowl, a defense mechanism Ben didn’t know how to make sense of just yet. Nonetheless, Ben was determined. “You have to believe me, here—“

The sound of Mrs. Williams between them made Bazine’s eyes hone in on something, probably latching onto the question. Ben lifted a brow at her. 

“Why were they called canal rays? Can anyone tell me?” Mrs. Williams asked. 

Ben nodded at Bazine just before Mich beside the window raised her hand to answer—and Bazine along with her. 

“Because the rays get attracted to the negative charge of the cathode and enter holes of canals in the cathode—“

“I knew it!” He gasped, maybe a little too loudly. He apologized to Mrs. Williams before turning to Bazine again—who now had the ghost of a smile on her lips. He grinned at her. 

Mrs. Williams moved on to explain that ‘canal rays’ was apparently an outdated term. What that was, Ben couldn’t be bothered to know, but he raised an eyebrow at Bazine when Mrs. Williams asked about the more recent term to no one in particular. 

“Ions.” Bazine answered. 

His eyes sparkled, his voice almost breathless. “Amazing.” Each time Mrs. Williams asked something or encouraged students to recite, Ben would turn to Bazine to hear her answers, and each time he did, the ghost of a smile turned slowly wider. 

Before he knew it, Chem was over and apparently, and so was their little game. Heather and Sadie were already waiting outside when Mrs. Williams let out. Sadie was going off about ‘the new kid’ Ben had no idea about. 

He turned to Bazine, who was standing beside Heather. Gone was the ghost of a smile, the rare sparkle in her eyes and in its place returned the same churlish Bazine in gym class who had hit the girl quite remorselessly. 

He took a chance still, reaching for her forearm carefully. When he did, she fixed her cold eyes on him. He ignored it. “Hey, you were amazing in class today, I really mean it.” 

A mix of hesitation and confusion glossed over her gaze and Ben could do nothing but wonder why that was. Always, she was chasing it away, reconfiguring her emotions from the inside by schooling her expression the way many have known her to be. It was oddly difficult to watch though Ben was at a loss as to what to do. Heather took interest in the exchange seconds later and by then Bazine pulled her arm out of Ben’s hold. 

“What’s going on?” Heather asked in that inflection-riddled way she talked. Bazine scoffed, throwing her shoulders back and marching forward. Sadie followed suit, already waxing poetic about how this might just be her chance to finally get the hot jock guy instead of Heather again. Heather then pointed out that maybe if Sadie channeled her talkative energy into approaching one of the guys at school, she might actually have a chance. The rest of the conversation died as they rounded a corner, leaving Ben alone with his thoughts.

He wasn’t kidding when he said those things about Bazine’s hidden memory skills. He could figure that out just from listening to her fill in the sentences Mrs. Williams would leave hanging in the air. What he couldn’t figure out was just how strange it was that she would even keep it to herself. She could blow every single one of their classmates out of the water if she’d continued, and yet she exited the room without any acknowledgement of what she’d done. 

Ben supposed the answers were out of his hands. He stared down at his colorless drawing one last time, how he had forgotten all about it entirely when Bazine started talking textbook, and headed off for art class. 

* * *

The more the day unraveled, the more he regretted doing that list, including _nose freckles_, like an absolute _ dolt. _As if it wasn’t enough that it had been all he was able to think about all morning, now he was crashing face-first into thinking about it all afternoon, too, as he watched the same girl he strangely dreamed about enter like a whirlwind of crackling energy through the door, putting her hand-painted tumbler on her desk with a dull thud. 

He did everything he could to avoid looking at her (he knew he would be spending an inordinate amount of time looking at those fucking freckles) if only so he could gather his wits about him if she tried to take the seat beside him. 

She didn’t—but his heart still thrashed wildly from betrayal. The feeling reminded him of pretending to not want the last piece of bacon even as everything in his body screamed at him to just go for it. 

Bacon-bravery lay in another dimension entirely from this one, of course; if there was one thing Ben would never compare any girl to, it was to piece of meat. 

Just as she did at the church, she ignored him but made sure he knew she did, almost like she was playing a little game. The way she did this was by looking at him from her seat exactly when she knew he was looking, fixing him with a blank gaze before turning back around to whatever she was doing.

* * *

After art class, Ben waited for Bazine. He knew she was coming out of drama class in a few minutes, so he leaned back on some lockers adjacent to the drama classroom, completing his humble drawing with more messy lines. 

When Bazine came out, Ben’s face broke out into a smile. She wasn’t smiling, but her hair was down, reaching down to her shoulder blades and sprinkled with an assortment of glitter. It made her look like a goddess in the mellow swath of the descending sunlight filtering in from the south windows, turning her normally dark eyes into an enticing shade of brown. 

“Hi,” he said, the words barely leaving his mouth when another form barreled straight into Bazine’s side. Ben was confused for a half-second, feeling wetness staining the side of his face—and seeing the same wetness along Bazine’s entire left flank as well as her face. The liquid was water from a tumblr, held by—

“Watch it, bar girl!” 

Ben froze. _ Bar girl? _

The hallway around them stood frozen. Had all these people been here all along?

The barely-concealed anxiety etched on her face forced him to think about what he’d done to her behind her back. It made him feel responsible for Bazine’s outburst. 

“Baz,” he began but Bazine ignored him, the ghost of a menacing smile quirking up the side of her face. 

“Relax, Benny. She’s got it. Don’t you, bar girl?” she grinned. “I’m sure she’s used to wiping things down. Like a bartop maybe? Or a toilet rim soaked in urine and vomit?” All around them, the students laughed at the girl whose cheeks were now stained red with humiliation. 

Ben had fallen down stairs before. He’d broken an arm pretending he could play basketball. He knew pain. But this kind of pain was nothing like that. This pain was what his emo playlist always talked about, pain he used to write about when Bazine refused to look at him—but _ worse. _

“What?” Bazine said, crossing her arms. “You heard me. Clean it up.” 

Ben watched her look around for a rag of some sort, face still impressively impassive but shame shown so clearly in her the way she gripped her tumblr so tightly. Bazine tugged the end of the open ratty button-down she wore over her shirt. “Uh-uh-uh. Use this.” 

How the hell could things go so horribly wrong so easily? He thought about saving face at the last minute. But he knew he couldn’t. He was there when she looked up to find him in the bushes, spying on her life without her permission. She would put two and two together and realize him to be the culprit. There was no escape. 

Even if he apologized now, he knew he didn’t deserve to be forgiven. 

She was slipping her arms out of the button-down’s sleeves, for goodness sakes, and wiping down the side of Bazine’s face as she looked down on her through her nose. 

And he just stood there, complicit. 

She said nothing when she finished, holding onto her now-soggy article of clothing and stepping back. She looked up at him with an expression he couldn’t decipher before she turned around and left. Ben rationalized he didn’t have to follow her just like he didn’t during that volleyball practice; his mind told him this was different. Ben had a hand in this social torture Bazine had just orchestrated.

He grimaced, his mother had taught him better than this. 

And so, when Bazine uttered the single syllable of his name and traced the steps she took he ignored her, determined to make things right. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *ducks rotten tomatoes thrown my way* I promise it will get better. *hides away until the next update*


	5. Sunflower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He spotted a memo block near the cork board. It was neon green and looked almost illegal with the way it screamed at him from where he stood. 
> 
> Perfect. 
> 
> He plucked a piece and fished for a pen in his bag’s front pocket, scribbling a note. This one wouldn’t be discarded, it wasn’t an afterthought. This one was directed for someone. He hoped she could see it. Maybe they could talk about it. 
> 
> _You said you liked my emotions,_ he began to write. _So I would like to talk about yours and how I’ve hurt them. I’m sorry._
> 
> He tacked the note before he could change his mind, signing it with his initials at the bottom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All I can say is _SQUEAL._
> 
> Also here's some really, really, achingly tender mood music for this chapter, ["Sweet Disposition"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN7HQrgakZU) by The Temper Trap

Even as he followed her through the halls of the school to call out her name, he knew he had no constructed apology to go with it. She seemed to detect that, too, halting abruptly in the corridor and meeting his desperate gaze. She remained silent as she did so and Ben grasped for words. By the time he had finished a sort-of apology in his head, a swarm of students crowded the corridor so that she was able to steal away from him. 

It was unfortunate everything had to happen this way. Just when he was piecing her together life had to get in the way at the worst possible moment. Although, that might not even be accurate. Life didn’t have a direct hand in how this all unfolded; this was a Ben Solo Special. Every clue led back to him and, in a rather surprising twist, _ not _ Bazine. Even though he saw with his own eyes, as well as the eyes of many, that she was the one who humiliated her in front of everyone and he was just a bystander. 

What bothered him the most was how much he was using that excuse to justify the earlier event. He hated that his fallback was as lame as his attempt to apologize to her. Which, at the moment, consisted of only the general “I’m sorry” and not much else. He should be going above and beyond to show her how sorry he was, that was what he was supposed to do. Not dilly dally in the school entrance debating whether or not he should follow her. 

What was going on? He’d never met this girl before, how on Earth had she managed to become this… this… _ occupant _in his head? 

That was when he remembered something she said: “_Are you the one tacking notes on the art room cork board?” _

With renewed resolve, he bolted for the art room. They had to have shared art class all this time. She talked about his discarded thoughts like they were gems for her, brought it up when they first met like it was nobody’s business. How had he never noticed a girl like her before? How dense was he that he never managed to see her even as she stuck out like a sore thumb without a uniform? 

The art room felt a good place as any to locate her. After a cursory glance to the open field outside, he managed to deduce that she was not up for afternoon sketches under the bleachers. 

But she was nowhere to be seen in the art room either. She’d probably caught on what he wanted to do and found a way to circumvent it. What if he never got to apologize? What if he grew up and out of high school and came back to Maz’s bar when he was of age only to find that he was banned from entering it forever? Were they even allowed to do that? 

Worse, what if she never talked to him again after this? What if she never gave him a chance to explain himself? How was he going to live with himself, then? 

Overthinking was a hell of a drug, he thought, because even now, he only agonized over worsening scenarios. 

He spotted a memo block near the cork board. It was neon green and looked almost illegal with the way it screamed at him from where he stood. 

Perfect. 

He plucked a piece and fished for a pen in his bag’s front pocket, scribbling a note. This one wouldn’t be discarded, it wasn’t an afterthought. This one was directed for someone. He hoped she could see it. Maybe they could talk about it. 

_ You said you liked my emotions, _ he began to write. _ So I would like to talk about yours and how I’ve hurt them. I’m sorry. _

He tacked the note before he could change his mind, signing it with his initials at the bottom. 

This was so ridiculous. He could be with Bazine, wasn’t that what he always wanted? After what she’d done, he would be lying to himself if he said that it didn’t bother him that Bazine had to act like that around… Sunflower. It wasn’t right, he was seeing that now, but he also couldn’t help but think that maybe Bazine was coming from somewhere. 

People were, after all, deeper than they came off. At the moment, though, he couldn’t bring himself to care about where exactly Bazine was coming from. No, all he could think about was Sunflower probably crying somewhere, staining her beautiful drawings with tears because of what _ he’d _ done. 

He hated thinking about it. 

The students had filed out a long time ago. He was probably the only one left here. With heavy footsteps, he secured his backpack snuggly on his shoulders, running a hand through his hair out of exasperation. 

_ So much for that. _

Maybe it would be easier if he just forgot about it. They weren’t friends. He wouldn’t lose video game matches or miss birthday celebrations if she stopped talking or interacting with him. And if Mrs. Kanata eventually barred him from the pub, it wasn’t like he couldn’t find another place to go to. He had no obligation to mend a relationship between them when they didn’t have one. Sure, he’d seen her at the church giggling and laughing as she tolerated children Ben himself wouldn’t be able to stand. 

As he walked home, he found himself smiling at that—and then blushed, affected by her stellar light despite himself. 

Confined in his thoughts of her, he jumped with a very unmanly yelp when a sketchbook fell from the sky. The sky? That didn’t sound right. He picked it up, admiring the black and white drawing of what looked like a sunset. It was drawn in black ink, the entire landscape consisting of small dots. In some areas, the dots would be clumped together in places with deep dark shadows. They were grouped together in crevices and deep depressions in the valleys in the drawing, while the sparsely-dotted areas caught most of the sunlight. 

It was the most beautiful thing Ben had ever seen. 

“Hey!” A voice made his shoulders jump, drawing a curse from his lips. He whipped his head around. 

“Up here!” the voice said. Slowly, he looked up and there she was, his Sunflower, thighs on either side of a wide tree branch and looking at him. She grinned like the Cheshire cat, playful and lazy. Perfect, too, that she was in a tree. 

“You’re in a tree…?” 

She looked at the branches, at the sturdy wooden arms snaking up and out like eager serpents with heads turned to the sky. The leaves shone in glossy, vibrant green, catching the warmth of the molten gold sunset. 

Sunflower sat in the heart of such a marvel of nature, hidden away like a secret in this moment that they shared. “Isn’t that bit obvious?” 

Great. Not only was he already embarrassing himself to one girl, here was another. He took a deep breath, remembering the inner turmoil of his apology, and leant his head back to look at her. 

“I’m sorry. About… about earlier.” He said, watching her face carefully for any kind of reaction. Anything. Even if it’d hurt him—and he knew it’d hurt. He was complicit in the act, of course, and he wanted to make an effort to change that. 

Her reaction was slow but it was there. She was very expressive, he noticed. In the last minute that had gone by, she had blinked at him, pursed her lips in thought as she drew her eyebrows back down from how high they had flown at his apology. He felt oddly naked, even though to any onlooker, it was very clear which of them was the odd one out. 

Odd or not, he knew he owed her an apology, and so here he was before her, swallowing the frog that had jumped in his throat and hoping against all hope that she didn’t jump him from her perch on the tree and end this conversation with a chokehold. 

Stupid that his mind went there, but it had already been racing since he knew he slipped up by telling Bazine about this girl’s potential financial problem, inadvertently pitting her situation against Bazine’s and her more… fortunate life. That had been days ago; the fact that he had been thinking about it for so long only firmed up his resolve of making it up to her. 

He would stand there for hours under her scrutiny if he needed to. If that was what it took for her to forgive him. Blessedly, she nodded firmly, gesturing him to come over. 

_Come over?_ _Was she asking him to climb that tree?_ “I am not climbing that tree.” He said, fidgeting. 

She pouted playfully. “And here I thought your apology was going pretty well.” 

“What?” He spat, staring at her questioningly. Unfazed, she stared back, lifting a brow in challenge. 

He huffed. “Fine. But if I get so much as a hairline fracture, you’re paying for the hospital bill.” He said as he braced his feet on the wooden trunk. He made a very pathetic sound as he touched a line of ants making their way up the tree just like he was and shook his hand vigorously. She laughed at him, loud and long, and he glared at her. 

“I’m sure you can take it, Solo. You just have to know how to fall the right way.” She replied, just as he settled himself on the thick branch beside her. If he had to guess, they were hairline-fracture-height from the ground. 

“There’s a right way of falling?” 

She nodded. “_Ukemi. _It’s called the art of falling or, ‘taking it.’” 

He was thoughtful. “Why would that be important to know?” 

She shrugged, rolling her shoulder and turning to him with a small smile. “For when you fall.” 

That was a curious way to phrase it. But he wasn’t so convinced. “What if I don’t?” 

“Then you hold on. You keep at it. Like I am. Like you are now,” she gestured to him, and then pointed to something below them. “You left my sketchpad, by the way.” 

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled, making to climb down when her hand came up to his chest to stop him, keeping her eyes on the bundle of papers. 

She wouldn’t have known. 

A few years from now, he would look at this moment in time, this cluster of seconds in what would be his considerably longer life, and he would safely say that this was one of the only moments he felt his heart beat so acutely. 

She wouldn’t know how much he blushed, because just as suddenly as she placed her hand over his chest, she was taking it off, climbing down the tree herself to get her sketchpad. 

It was a flimsy thing. When he looked at it, it rustled. This was not like the other sketchpad she’d lain on the bleachers to draw in when they first met. This was older, coffee stains coloring the edges and the papers so old Ben wondered if they would rip at the slightest pressure. 

She held it close to her as she came back up beside him, smoothing the worn covers with delicate fingers, carefully, so carefully. 

“New sketchbook?” He asked. 

“I think you mean ‘old’ sketchbook. It’s so very old.” She chuckled. 

“That wasn’t the one you brought to the church last Sunday.” 

She looked at him, her face twisted in bemused delight. He could feel himself sweating as she stared, blinking those gorgeous color-changing eyes now flashing brown in the sunset. “I mean— I—“ 

“It wasn’t.” She interrupted, chuckling to herself and rooting around the tree branch for her messenger bag. 

“Why were you at the church?” He asked. 

Perhaps he was not in a position to ask her any of this. Hell, he didn't even know if she’d accepted his apology, and yet here he was fishing for information about how she spent her Sundays, wondering why she would choose to spend it with overbearing children. 

But she made it easier, somehow, to just sit here and talk. To just bask in the fading glow of the sun and spill your guts out until there was nothing left. There would be no guts to spill for now, per se, but if the hypothetical gut-spilling would occur, what he was saying was he could imagine himself doing it in her presence. 

“I grew up in an orphanage.” She began. “I grew up with children almost everywhere I went. Before Maz adopted me, I was their older sister. I miss them every day, so I told myself, ‘what’s stopping me from being an older sister to these other kids?’ And that’s… basically how I got to the church.” 

“So you’re a Christian, too?” 

She scoffed. “No. I just go there for the kids.” He looked down at their feet and how they swung in unison without his knowledge. _ Comfortable_, the gesture said. 

He guessed faith and religion were difficult topics to navigate. Ben himself didn’t know where he stood in that regard, although his parents always told him he’d know in time, but that for now, he stood where they did. 

“Don’t you… find them annoying?” 

“Of course I do!” She grinned, jostling him a little. His arms flailed a little and she shot forward to grab him around the torso, holding on until he was steady again. If he hadn’t felt close enough to her before, he sure did now, breathing in the sweat on her skin and taking in the little nicks on her chin that presented themselves as thin white lines. 

She smelled like the wood around them, like ink, which he knew for sure stained her fingers, but her breathing was calm, relieved. After a while, she laughed, leaning back and letting him press himself on her side. Sunflower covered her face with one arm, her mirth dying in her throat. “Now it’s my turn to say sorry.” 

He was so close. 

He’d never been this close to a girl before. They smell so good all the time, even her, who lived life drenched in the sun and the scent of her crafts. Urgently, he drew back, but gently enough that he wouldn’t have to worry about that hairline fracture he had been so adamant on not having. 

“Does this… does this make us even?” He asked, scratching the back of his neck as he struggled to look away from her. 

A beat, and then a smile: “Yeah. We’re even.” 

“What’s your name?” He asked. 

“Rey. Rey Kanata.” 

* * *

One of the few lessons he’d learned—and actively remembered—from his father was the immutable fact that women were a mystery. Everyone in the family just knew _ the _ Han Solo did not give very good advice. Great grandma Padmé may be hard of hearing but working for the government for years had kept her senses sharp. Sharp enough, it seemed, to sniff out bullshit where bullshit appeared. 

And Han Solo’s advice was, for a lack of a better term, usually bullshit. 

This one was different. This one stuck with Ben because it was simple. It was concise, straight-to-the-point enough that he could use it to put two and two together. There was still the fact that Leia had to come and clarify to him that women were no more mysteries than men were, that people just liked saying women were mysteries so they could get away with misunderstandings that were not the woman’s fault. 

He supposed his mother was right, though he already knew that. Still, the girl _ was _ a mystery. _ Rey _showed only enough of herself for him to understand her “at the moment.” Almost like she gave information on the basis of what was needed. 

He’d asked why she went and had fun with children at the church even though she wasn’t practicing any kind of religion, and she’d provided him information only appropriate for that moment. 

_ Mystery. _ What a very vague word. But that was what she was to him at the moment; an enigma living in his mind. Not that he minded that. Did he? No. 

So why was it that he balked when she barely acknowledged him during their shared History class? As the class let out, he even sidled up beside her to maybe strike a conversation, which, he honestly admitted to himself was just such a pathetic “hi” and “goodbye” as they migrated to art class before the day ended. 

No such luck, he realized, even here, Rey’s attention to him was limited to small smiles. They were small but they were somehow so very powerful at the same time, taking up so much space in his head.

A small note on a neon green memo pad flapped in the slight breeze in the room. Ben squinted at it, resisting the urge to smile. 

_I hope you like my emotions, too. Thank you, B. And I forgive you._ _-R._


	6. Spare Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Where she touched, there flew colors. Always vibrant, brilliant, unlike everyone — only her._
> 
> The sentence formed in his mind, much to his surprise. It was pretty, so pretty, in fact, that he had to write it down. So he did, rummaging in his bag but staying rooted in place nonetheless, settling his hopeless, old-man-smelling uniform over his bag and taking his journal out. Almost every page was filled with musings, scraps of poetry he’d erased and Coheed and Cambria lyrics he’d studied for the purpose of “emulating” the feel of them. 
> 
> _I like to think she pierced the veil of reality with her ink-stained fingers, painted the sky different colors at will, all shifting on its head when she blinked — brown, green, gray._
> 
> _She commanded nature, interacted with wood and sun and wind unafraid, always one step closer to beauty, so that she gleamed like everlasting starlight—_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, hello o/ 
> 
> I would like to thank Missporgy first for that cologne reference ehe. I wouldn't have been able to write the biggest chunk of this scene if it wasn't for her. Nervous about this chapter for idk exactly what reason, lol. 
> 
> Oh, and, in case you guys would like to get spooked, (Idk if you will, it might just suck but I’m challenging myself so, yeah) I'm dropping a Halloween oneshot. And if you want some weird vampire stuff, I got one, too. Dropping around October. o u o 
> 
> Mood music for this chapter: ["101"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXry9wQQYtU) by Walla

Warmer weather called for lesser clothing. Lesser clothing, however, was not possible when your parents thought entering their son in a uniformed private school was a good idea. 

As the school came into view, he looked at the maroon cement plastered facade and the slightly-weathered ‘Alderaan High’ in chunky letters. He ascended the stone steps to the entrance, fingers slowly coming up to itch at his collar. Some students were here early, sitting out on the quad and talking over books, D&D maps, even an actual science book so thick Ben thought it was a phone directory. 

The cluster of plants on either side of the door entrance basked in the attention of the sun, the vibrant green leaves so alive. So unlike him, suffering in his too-hot uniform and damn nearly about to pull his hair out. Armitage Hux of the student council just a few steps away was handing out flyers as students walked past, some accepting the paper with curious nods, some ignoring it completely. Paullie was beside him, that space nerd who always had something to say during every science class she had with him. 

Unable to take it any longer, Ben sat down on a bench beside the doors, ignoring the stares he got from people when he loosened two buttons on his uniform. _ They _weren’t feeling hot; he was, so he tried to ignore them as best he could. 

Strangely enough, Bazine was still nowhere to be seen. He didn’t know her number because he wasn’t sure if he was already at that stage, so he relied on good ‘ol observation again, and eventually came to the conclusion that she almost always came within minutes of his arrival at the entrance. So why was she late now? 

By this time, the uniform decided to be itchy around his armpits. So here, seated there on this fine, gradually-heating morning, was Benjamin Solo self-consciously reaching bony fingers to scratch at his pit and discreetly smelling them to see if he was reeking. Bazine wouldn’t like that. 

As he waited, he fished for his cologne and hurriedly decided where to use it. This was where being Leia Organa-Solo’s son became useful. He spritzed some on his wrist and pressed them behind his ears, and, after deciding that wasn’t enough, went ahead and just doused his whole body. _ There. _ This way, he could account for other potential problem areas. 

Only after he had covered himself with the cologne did he realize it wasn’t even his. _ Paco Rabanne _ , it said on the green bottle, a stylistic P and R on the front in line art. 

_ “The fuck…” _

Now he just smelled like 80s prom and misogyny. “Shit,” he cursed, grasping for his hem and trying desperately to air it out. To no avail. His head whipped around, straining to spot if Bazine was in the quad. _ Great fucking job, Solo _.

It wasn’t like he had a choice. He could only hope Bazine wouldn’t notice the old person scent he’d apparently be sporting now. Turning on his heel, he looked frantically for some sort of solution. Just a few meters from him sat a student with dark cropped hair. He was wearing a varsity jacket, sitting casually with his ankles crossed, and reading from a book. His navy blue backpack sat by his feet, zippers wide open so that Ben could see some of the contents inside. There seemed to be no other students around the area at the moment, so he took his chance and drew closer to the jock. (It killed him to do so. He looked new and entirely too built to possibly be the same age as him.) 

When he neared, Built-Jock smiled warmly at him, setting his book face down on his lap. Curious, Ben tried to make out the words on the cover. 

“Hi,” said Built-Jock, when Ben just stood there awkwardly for what seemed like too long a time. Built-Jock fidgeted. “Can I help you?” 

Remembering himself, Ben straightened up, but even that didn’t make him feel any more confident. With an internal sigh, he pushed himself to talk above his petty jealousy. “I— uh. Do you have a cologne I could uh, borrow?” 

Built-Jock’s brows lifted. “Oh, yeah sure. Hold on.” When he reached into the gaping opening in his bag, Ben looked at his hands, comparing them to his bonier ones, and frowned. This person’s shoulders also seemed to be wider and broader than his, which just consisted of two bony structures that may or may not be shoulders holding up his too-pale skin. 

Built-Jock offered him a little spray bottle with Isopropyl Alcohol on the label in blocky text. Puzzled, Ben looked up. “This is alcohol.” 

“Hm?” He hummed, before his eyes landed on the container. “Oh! No, it’s cologne. I just put it in that sprayer so I could bring it along with me. More compact.” 

Ben nodded, taking a tentative sniff of the nozzle. “This smells expensive.” He couldn’t help but say. 

“It is,” he replied, but Ben didn’t detect any arrogance behind it. “I’m trying to make it last hence… the sprayer.” 

Ben shrugged. There was no better option anyway. Carefully, he sniffed which parts of him smelled strongly of his father’s cologne, focusing the sprayer in those areas and feeling so-and-so about the result. He winced when he pulled the sprayer back, still smelling the strong, invasive musk of _ Paco Rabanne. _ It was somehow worse now. _ Fucking hell. _When he handed the sprayer back to the jock, he was already looking at Ben like he was trying to understand the proportions of his face. 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, trying to sound polite. “Is that… you?” 

Was it possible to sweat some more? Bazine was going to be here any second. Panicked, Ben stammered a pitiful “thank you”, shoved the cologne in his hands, and bolted down to quad. He looked for somewhere to take off his uniform, spotting a shady corner near a low-hanging tree where he could steal away for a few seconds in the relative dark. His skin prickled when he took his uniform off, the air around him whooshing against his slender arms. Thankfully, his mother had insisted on him wearing an undershirt today. With shaking fingers, he held the yoke of his uniform tight, vigorously shaking the garment and praying some freaky physics would take away the concoction of odd scents in his clothes. After a while, he brought the garment close to his nose to sniff—and immediately felt like gagging. 

_ Fuck, fuck, fuck. _

Above him probably somewhere, some gods were having the time of their lives picking on his sorry ass. To make matters worse, he was still sweating. When he moved, he sweated. He sweated more as he shook his uniform, but if he didn’t shake it out, he was going to smell exactly like his drama class teacher, who, he now realized, probably wore the same cologne as his father. 

Looking up, he saw one of Bazine’s lackeys had appeared on the quad, looking lost and alone. _ Shit. _ She swung her head around, probably also looking for any sign of Bazine. Ben bolted for the tree, crouching behind it and making himself small. After a full minute of looking around, she left, taking the granite steps to no doubt sit on the bench he had just been on. 

He looked at the shirt in his hands, whimpering to himself. What now? A few meters away from him, someone laughed out loud, her chestnut hair flowing from a high ponytail. She was wearing the same uniform combination as every girl in the school—an unassuming white button-down top with a maroon stripe on the pocket and the logo of Alderaan High—but somehow she looked more beautiful in it, exuding radiance as she laughed. It was like she commanded the sun around her, her brown hair turning almost auburn in the rays. 

When she faced his direction, he knew she could not see him behind the tree, but he could see _ her _, Rey… in a uniform. 

He blinked rapidly, unable to believe his eyes. 

That was her, alright, he could see the same freckles even though he was far away, could make out the shape of her hands as she held onto the handlebar of her bike. She knelt down, chaining her ride on the rack, patting down some dirt off her knees. The low tree had been close to the bike rack all this time, which currently accommodated Rey’s ride. Ben recognized her “very” old sketchbook, too, nestled on the mounted basket, as well as her collection of colored pencils. 

_ Where she touched, there flew colors. Always vibrant, brilliant, unlike everyone — only her. _

The sentence formed in his mind, much to his surprise. It was pretty, so pretty, in fact, that he had to write it down. So he did, rummaging in his bag but staying rooted in place nonetheless, settling his hopeless, old-man-smelling uniform over his bag and taking his journal out. Almost every page was filled with musings, scraps of poetry he’d erased and Coheed and Cambria lyrics he’d studied for the purpose of “emulating” the feel of them. 

_ I like to think she pierced the veil of reality with her ink-stained fingers, painted the sky different colors at will, all shifting on its head when she blinked — brown, green, gray. _

_ She commanded nature, interacted with wood and sun and wind unafraid, always one step closer to beauty, so that she gleamed like everlasting starlight— _

“Ben?” 

His whole body jumped, his thighs jerking at the sound of her voice. The journal perched on his thigh flew to the ground as he blinked at her. She regarded the journal for a moment, before walking over to where it lay to pick it up. He bit his lip as he looked at it in her hand, scurrying to a stand and snatching the journal immediately when she was within range. Rey’s face shown with shock, but only for a split second. His shirt rumpled when he pushed it aside to shove his journal into the debts of his bag. No one was going to see it. 

Rey cleared her throat. His head turned to her. “You’re a little… underdressed.” 

He blushed, bringing his hand up and coughing into his first to hide the rising flush he knew would be there. Deflecting sounded like his best option. “And you’re a little… dressed.” 

She grinned wide, surprising him a little by twirling in place. It flared her skirt a little as Ben watched, slack-jawed, sighing quietly. He remembered watching her back at the church. She seemed like she walked with light on her heels and like the rest of her body was bathed in it, all while he stood in the shadows. 

It felt like forever but what he was sure was no more than 5 seconds. 

“Do you like it?” She asked with an eager smile on her face. 

“Do I— well.” It was their uniform. He’d seen it before. A thousand times. “I guess.” 

She beamed, smoothing a hand on one side of the skirt, and Ben did not understand why the small act of it made his breath hitch. _ He’d seen this uniform a thousand times. _Why that little flick of her wrist took up so much of his brain capacity. Did she always have agile-looking fingers? “Thank you, I made it!” 

Ben felt his eyes bug out. “You _ made _ it?” 

She chuckled, pearly whites peeking as her smile widened. He smiled unconsciously with her, and he decided he liked her smile. 

“Well, I _ sort of _ made it. It was a hand me down. I stitched up some rips here, where the zipper is—“ she said, proudly moving to her side and cocking the side of her hips a little to touch the stitch on the fabric in white thread. If one stood far enough, they wouldn’t see the thin thread, but up close it looked more tangible, like a little treasure hiding from view. 

Ben reminded himself it was nothing but a flimsy thread for the express purpose of holding something together. That was it. Simple. Clinical. But he found himself reaching for it. Before he knew it, his fingers extended to touch the white line. Rey stood very still as he did, which was something he forgot to account for. 

Pulling his hand back, he became awash with renewed embarrassment. “I’m sorry!” He stepped back, feeling almost criminal. What the hell came over him? 

She seemed to recover much faster, clearing her throat as her eyes landed somewhere out of his line of sight. _ Jesus _. Will this day ever end? 

“Why are you in your undershirt?” She asked, stepping close to his shrouded bag and his uniform. Ben stood before her then, blocking her advance. 

“I— uhh. There’s been an accident. Kind of. Just—“ he sprung into action a second too late, because now Rey’s hand had come out to reach for his uniform. Somewhere beneath him, he just wished a troll would open up a hole on the ground he was standing on. In the same way he viscerally reacted to the offending scent, she did, too, before laughing it off and grimacing with a smile. She looked at him like she was trying to figure out what was going on in his mind. He shrugged, he didn’t even know it himself. 

The side of her lip scrunched up, in that expressive way she did when he sat beside her up on that tree. Her lips had twisted, one of her eyebrows lifted, and she nodded to herself. He felt himself smile. 

“Come on.” She said, holding his uniform like it hadn’t just offended her. Before he could offer up a defense—Bazine might be here _ any minute _—she was already grasping his fingers. Her hand was warm and rough where it lay in his, sliding into place like it belonged there. 

* * *

When Rey dragged him through the fire doors on the side of the school, he hadn’t expected her to take him all the way up to the art classroom. The early hour meant no one littered the halls just yet, but even if they did, he doubted there would be enough of them to notice he and Rey sneaking in. In his experience, no one was ever particularly interested in high school. 

He watched Rey go through boxes on the shelves below the wide windows, eyes skimming the labels and fingers feeling for what was inside. 

Having found what she wanted, she plucked a box out and plunked it on a nearby desk. 

“Come here,” she said, lifting the cover. He came to stand beside her, and there inside the box was a similar-looking uniform. All the markings were the same and when he pressed it to his chest, the hem was only an inch short from the top of his pants. Well, at least it wasn’t a crop top. 

“How’d you know about this?” He asked. Rey grinned. 

“Mrs. Green keeps spare uniforms here for when students have accidents with paint and stuff. Just don’t forget to return it.” 

He nodded. It was the least he could do. “I will. Thank you.” He said as he put it on. It was still too short for his cursed long upper body, but it was worlds better than smelling like he was a rich highroller uncle from Coruscant’s famous casinos. Once he’d donned it, Rey tugged his hand and led him all the way out of the fire escape stairs and into the open, just in time for the bell to ring. 

She beamed at him one last time, shooting him a double thumbs up before leaving for the main entrance. He returned the gesture even if she didn’t see it, coming to the entrance himself still wondering where Bazine was. 

* * *

About thirty minutes into regular and irregular polygons, Bazine bustled in the classroom, eyes a little wide. Ben was on high alert as she drew herself up straight and walked to her desk with characteristic grace. Her eyes landed on him just before she sat down, so he smiled back at her. She ignored him, smoothing her hair almost every five minutes throughout the whole class, something she never did because she always came to school looking absolutely perfect. 

* * *

Just before school officially ended for the day, Ben decided a perfectly normal final thank you to Rey was in order, in honor of her gallant rescue of Ben and his uniform mishap. (Said uniform had long been shoved into a paper bag since this morning, pressed depressingly at the bottom of his bag.) 

But Rey just didn’t seem to like having him around, unless she wouldn’t be so unavailable to him all the time. Her absence and her unexplainable active decision to keep avoiding him affecting him more than it should. He came to the conclusion that Rey was really good at making sure people around her were always at arm’s length. He was okay with that. He didn’t want to press. 

At least he tried not to, but he couldn’t sit still long enough and focus on what he was doing as he thought about the events of the day. Rey was sitting on her chair like nothing happened. Maybe that was for the best. The confrontation with Bazine _ had _ just happened a few days ago, and he’d only recently apologized for it. Of his half anyway, the jury was still out on whether or not Bazine would ever apologize. He suspected, like Rey probably already figured out herself, that neither of them would ever hear Bazine apologize for anything, such was the reputation of the classic school Mean Girl. 

Before Ben left class feeling all sorts of confused at having been ignored by Rey yet again, he spotted a lone post-it note on the cork board. On it’s pink square face, Rey wrote: _ And I forgive you. -R. _

His heart jumped for reasons he could not explain, wanting to make sure her words did not go unanswered. 

_ I like the uniform you “sort of” made for yourself. _ _ I can't wait to see what other wonderful things you make. _ _ -B. _


	7. Behind Their Backs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey’s finger came up to his lips, quite literally shushing him. It fell like a comfortable weight on his lips. So silly. Whatever it was they were doing, it was so silly… His heart thumped anyway, as she kept her hold there and kept all her attention confined to the task of finding out the mystery behind Shakespeare’s name. 
> 
> He didn’t even care about that anymore. The only thing he cared about was how awkward they must look now and how embarrassing he looked like, a tall and lanky teenage boy at the mercy of this sunshine of a girl. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and held her finger away softly, just before she chuckled quietly. 
> 
> “Your hands are warm. I like them.” She muttered, still slightly distracted by the task at hand. Ben’s heartbeat grew louder in his ears and he blushed, not knowing what to say. Over at the front desk, students were lining up to take out whatever book they needed for a class and here he was, just standing in front of this girl like… like… 
> 
> “Uhh,” he stammered, keeping his hold around her wrist anyway because he couldn’t understand how she didn’t realize she’d just paralyzed him into not talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, Cosmic's back! :D
> 
> Mood music for this chapter: ["You Make My Dreams"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EErSKhC0CZs) by Daryl Hall & John Oates (just that on repeat :3)

_ _

_I make so many things! I’ve got junkyard art back home. I call one of them Willy. -R._

_Willy? -B._

_Because it looks like a… willy. :D -R. _

* * *

Ben forgot a pencil. 

Out of everything he could possibly forget, it was a pencil. His shortest pencil to date, the metal around the eraser tip bitten so many times that it wasn’t its original shape anymore. He’d used it when he began brainstorming and thinking about branching into longer prose that one time he got so emotional watching _Dear, John_. 

Now all the beautiful things he’d been able to write and draft with it would be no more. Dramatic, he knew, but it was only because he was trying to stall for time as he collected himself, looking at the paper in front of him and thinking about how he was going to do this activity. 

Rey was quiet and focused beside him, sketching something in graphite so vigorously the small scritches danced a little in the stuffy recycled air. Few windows were open today after Mrs. Green decided that the warm afternoon was to be kept outside for the time being. With the memory of the cologne debacle still fresh in his mind (why did the super embarrassing memories stay longer in one’s consciousness more than happy ones?), he would have to agree with her on this one, and even—though she wouldn’t know why—thank her. The uniform had been returned discreetly this morning when everyone was distracted by the distressed speaker on the intercom: Mr. Henderson speaking in a vague and mild tone about something Ben could care less about. It obviously affected everyone around him though and he felt stupid not to mirror that same feeling. 

Over the course of the day, Ben had completely forgotten what the announcement might have been about, and, apparently, even his pencil. 

Rey was in the mood not to ignore him today, and maybe that was half of the reason he encouraged himself to ask for her help again. 

“Hey, Rey?” He whispered surreptitiously, glancing up to check if Mrs. Green was still writing something on her notebook. 

Rey hummed, looking at him after finishing up a line. 

“Do you have a pencil I can borrow?” Rey twisted her lip the way he knew she did when she was thinking. One side of her lip pulled up on the right side of her face and her left eyebrow shot up. And just like he did the first time, he found it amusing. 

She looked over at what he’d done so far, studying the shoddy bisecting lines of ink. He was supposed to be remaking the astronaut cover art on Coheed and Cambria’s “The Afterman: Descension.” Although, how well that was going for him was about as good as anyone suspected—which was to say, not good at all. He was only able to sketch out the helmet before his pen gave up on him and that was when he decided maybe he should just stick to a pencil. The arms he’d been able to sketch lightly looked askew, like the astronaut had been pushed down the stairs and broke both of its arms. 

Ben pointed it out to Rey out of frustration and her only answer was: “I don’t see anything wrong with it.” 

“It’s in permanent ink and the arms look like they’re snapped in half.” 

“Eww,” she whined. Ben smiled. 

“It does!” He insisted. “So I need a pencil to clean it up a little and because my pen ran out of ink.” He added, lifting said pen. 

“But why?” She asked, eyes darting between the drawing and his face. She had about ten freckles scattered on her nose, a teensy shade darker than her skin tone. When she scrunched her nose to look at his drawing closely, the freckles clumped together. “It doesn’t look that bad.” 

“You just said ‘ew.’” 

She grinned. “I know, I know! But you can just say it’s an art style. All the best artists do that.” 

“Really? Name one.” 

“Picasso.” 

Ben fake-gasped. “How dare you?” 

Rey shrugged, smiling. “It’s the truth.” 

“All this because I wanna borrow a pencil.” 

“Look, really,” she said, quietly tugging her chair closer. The metal scraped on the floor only a little, and when she reached her place beside him, he noticed she smelled like coconuts. “This bend here, that arm there… it makes sense, kind of.” 

Her lips were moving, forming shapes around the words, but all he was able to focus on was how soft they looked, how pink and absolutely pretty. 

“How…” he asked quietly. 

“Because it’s like he’s reaching behind him instead. And this other arms looks like—“ she tentatively lifted her left hand, positioning it in the air. “Half his body is doing the robot dance.” 

He tried not to smile too wide. “That’s very specific.” 

“But you can see it, right?” She replied expectantly. He held her gaze. 

“Yes. Very clearly.” 

A smile formed on her pink lips. How the hell did it look so soft? “Sometimes, you just gotta find the good in everything. Just because you think something is ugly, doesn’t mean it is.” 

He was quiet for a minute too long, failing to notice how his voice, too, had hovered barely above a whisper. “Is it?” 

She nodded, still smiling so brightly. In the back of his mind, he stored that smile for… he didn’t know what. It looked pretty. That’s what you did when things looked pretty. Appreciate them. This was him appreciating her smile. 

“Pencil?” Rey offered after a while, clearing her throat and fishing for a pencil in the front pocket of her bag. She handed it to him shyly, suddenly quiet. 

Ben took it with quiet thanks and soon she was returning her seat to its original place, taking the smell of coconuts with her. 

* * *

_I have come to the conclusion that sports is just torture olympics for teenagers. -B._

_Really? What is your opinion on adult athletes, then? -R. _

_Abysmal. -B._

_Of course, you’d respond like that. What with all your writing powers. -R. _

_I’m not too sure about “writing powers”; does writing too many wish-fulfillment lines of poetry count as powers? Or am I just pathetic? -B._

_Not pathetic. Emotions are important. Sharing them is even more so. -R. _

* * *

Poe opened the bottle with a soft hiss, the terrible orange of the soda the only color in the dark room. Mr. Dameron had come up asking why the lights were turned off and Poe simply said it would help set the mood for the game. _Set the mood_. Ben had no idea what that meant, only that he found himself a little glad that he chose to spend time with Poe today instead of Bazine. 

She was lovely and Ben still stood by his declaration that he would fall on a knife for her—but sometimes she was just a little too exhausting. She was a little fickle these days, and whenever he asked, she never answered, plying him with something else to do other than question certain aspects of her life. 

Poe pressed a button on the PS1 and the fizzy, retina-burning game slowly played out on screen. It was the EA Soccer that came with the console when Poe bought it with the money he saved from years ago. It was so old and outdated and was so unlike the new game Poe told him he’d bought, on the new console he’d also saved up to buy, but he was very proud of this purchase. Playing EA Soccer was like a reminder of that accomplishment. 

Like always, Ben didn’t know which player he was on screen, only that he should keep moving in case someone shot the ball into the net. Poe offered him a red cup with soda already in it, sipping his as he watched Ben’s bony-and-somehow-meaty fingers mash the buttons. After a while, he joined in, button-mashing with his soda-sticky fingers. 

“So, Rey, huh?” He said, blinking back at the acidic green glow of the animated grass of the soccer field. 

Ben frowned. “What about her? Also, are you number 24?” 

Poe shrugged, sighing. Ben could smell his soda breath. “Man, I never know with this. But what I'm saying is, you seem to be getting cozy with each other.” 

“Getting cozy? Come on,” Ben replied, easing his character a little off to the side to intercept the ball. The ring moving along under the avatar’s feet and the arrow over its head told him as much that it was following his controls. “I only borrowed a pencil from her in art class.” 

“Really?” 

Ben turned and saw Poe’s wide grin and realized his mistake. Taking a sip from his cup was the single, meager distraction tactic he was able to employ, so he just threw all his attention back to the game. Ben hoped Poe wouldn’t latch onto that piece of information. 

He did. Of course, he did. “I don’t share an art class with you but thanks for the update.” 

“Whatever, let’s just play this game.” He insisted, thinking about coconuts and nose freckles and Picasso. 

* * *

_My mother wants me to go out shopping for new clothes. What color do you think suits me? -R. _

_Anything. -B. _

_Are you just saying that because you can’t be arsed to answer the question? -R. _

_I’m not. It’s because I think every color matches your eyes. They have so many colors. -B._

* * *

As the days went by and Ben and Rey talked through the corkboard notes, he realized he’d kept everything they had so far. When she tacked a note and he’d see it just before she left class or the following day, he’d keep it, slipping it in his journal and scribbling his response with a flourish. 

It didn’t work; his handwriting was almost always incomprehensible. She never seemed to have a problem with it. 

From Ben’s observation, the same sunbeam of a personality she had was infused in the way she wrote, the way they interacted, even through these little stolen moments. The 21st century held a world of options. He could have asked for Rey’s number if he only had the courage to do so in the cafeteria, but he felt like he shouldn’t, unsure as to where he stood with her really. He never saw her carrying a phone, though, and a big part of him seemed content that they were just talking this way. It didn’t feel different or alienating or disconnected. They poured enough of their hearts in each note that it eliminated any other kind of pretense, any sliver of a doubt to the other’s sincerity. 

She made it easier, somehow. It was different when Ben talked to her. On the occasion, they’d only ever glance at each other in between classes, smiling proudly but shyly to each other when one of them was reciting. She made him want to learn to lipread because she’d feed him answers sometimes when Mrs. Hahn was in a mood to grill them about Hamlet. 

How she managed to know the words was a mystery to him, but not before he saw her notebook and asked her why she had all these plot points of Hamlet in advance. 

“My mother likes Shakespeare.” She’d said, flipping through a page where all his plays and works and sonnets were recorded, each written with faded ink on paper and the sure strokes of someone who truly cared about it. 

Ben fixed his eyes on the name labeled on top of the list, leaning into the open notebook she had in the palm of her hand. She was a whole head shorter than him so he had to duck down to see. Her skin still smelt like the sun, still tickled his nose with coconut. He hummed. 

“I don’t think that’s how you spell Shakespeare.” 

Rey’s entire face became marred with confusion. “Excuse me?” 

“There’s an ‘e’ at the end.” 

“Yeah, and?” 

“That’s not Shakespeare’s name.” 

Incredulous, she looked at him with wry amusement. Her fingers snapped the book shut and for a long moment, her silence felt like forever. English class had just finished but Ben had a feeling this would be one of those escapades. Like the 80s cologne mishap and how she saved his ass like it was no one’s business. Maybe it was also none of anyone’s business if they cut through the sea of students to steal a few moments in the library. 

Over the din of everyone else, Ben could only hear her voice. The doors to the library were heavier, made of a deep dark wood. It was hefty as he and Rey pushed it open. She skipped over to the front desk just as soon as she stepped in, leaving him to watch her form, long legs he never really saw until now. They were slightly lighter, slender and lean. He followed the sight of it as he moved to follow her. 

There were long tables on each side, one side lined with computers. The studious crowd sat there, buried under high stacks of thick books. Red velvet carpeting spanned the space beneath his feet, running like blood through the two sections of long tables situated on each side, standing perpendicular to the walls beside the door. Each section was bracketed by bookshelves stocked full with textbooks and general references. It reminded him of his mother’s study back home. Or the quasi study quality of it, what with half of it being a special corner of their house where his mother invited church friends over for afternoon bible study. 

Whatever it was Rey told the librarian, it was over, because soon she was beside him again, placing her calloused hands in his and pulling him along the side of one of the shelves facing the empty long table opposite the one with the computers on it. He felt awkward walking behind Rey at the library. He felt awkward just how much she was already weaving her way into his life. It was countable on one hand the number of months they’d known each other, and even then, their communication up until now had been through notes instead of actual face-to-face conversation.

And he was okay with that. Truly. 

Several students slunk out of the door a few minutes in, but Ben just watched Rey touch the spines of the books to read them, brows meeting together in consternation. He didn’t know her next class, and so standing here, Ben felt a little guilty and responsible for this wild goose chase. 

He should have known this would be the case. Rey rarely shook in the face of adversity. To her, they were merely gateways to adventure, thresholds where unlimited discovery could be found on the other side. He supposed this was part of that, too, a manifestation of her constant need to explore and understand. Explore, he already saw, the part of her that peeked through that day at the church. This was the Understand bit. 

“Shakespeare is spelled without an ‘e.’” 

“Nuh-uh,” she snapped back in a whisper, tugging him just a little bit closer when she found what she was looking for. The book sat open in her palm, the starchy pages shuffling together as she flipped. 

“I know this because he was famous just as Britney Spears was and they have the same nam—“

Rey’s finger came up to his lips, quite literally shushing him. It fell like a comfortable weight on his lips. So silly. Whatever it was they were doing, it was so silly… His heart thumped anyway, as she kept her hold there and kept all her attention confined to the task of finding out the mystery behind Shakespeare’s name. 

He didn’t even care about that anymore. The only thing he cared about was how awkward they must look now and how embarrassing he looked like, a tall and lanky teenage boy at the mercy of this sunshine of a girl. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and held her finger away softly, just before she chuckled quietly. 

“Your hands are warm. I like them.” She muttered, still slightly distracted by the task at hand. Ben’s heartbeat grew louder in his ears and he blushed, not knowing what to say. Over at the front desk, students were lining up to take out whatever book they needed for a class and here he was, just standing in front of this girl like… like… 

“Uhh,” he stammered, keeping his hold around her wrist anyway because he couldn’t understand how she didn’t realize she’d just paralyzed him into not talking. Made his heart pound with only just a few words. 

The spell broke abruptly when she drew her hand back and gestured for him to lean over the page she stopped on. _William Shakespeare, _the text screamed at him in upside-down letters—with an ‘e.’ 

Rey’s eyes met his. “You were saying?” 

_Stupid. _“Sorry. But we didn’t have to come here, you know. You could have just handed my ass back at me by asking Mrs. Hahn yourself, in front of the class.” 

She slid the book back into place somewhat loudly. The hardbound cover thumped hard on the other side and made him flinch. “I hate confrontations like that. You shouldn’t have to be subjected to something like that just because I wanted to embarrass you.” 

“I—“

“Was that what you wanted?” She asked, quiet. 

“No, no! I was just saying. So you wouldn’t have to come all the way here with me.” 

“I like where I am when I’m with you,” she replied. Always unafraid, always unabashed. He tried not to fixate on it, really, he did. It took everything in him to try not to think about it. 

“Uhm. I have to get to class…” He uttered, suddenly hyper aware of the sound of his breath, the prickle of his skin and the spasms in his hands. 

“Right, right,” she smiled timidly, and even though her face looked every bit as unbothered, her whole body seemed tense. She looked up at him, disarming him with those freckles once again, those beautiful, unreadable eyes. _So, so pretty. _

Ben bit his lip, holding her gaze. “What’s your next class?” 

“French.” 

“And?” 

“Chemistry.” 

“I hate Chemistry.” He said, watching her shake with a chuckle. “And?” 

“Art class.” 

* * *

_You owe me for your Shakespeare mishap. How you would have embarrassed yourself if it wasn’t for me. :P _

They were doing notes today, like a couple of pen pals. He sat only a few inches away from her, feeling the gentle slide of her hand in his when she handed him a note. He clicked his pen and began writing down a response. 

_What do you want? _He wrote. 

_Another tree conversation. :D _

He whipped his head at her. “Really?” He mouthed, making sure his face mirrored the disbelief he felt inside. She shrugged, coyly smiling at him. Her fingers landed on the memo block on the ledge of her easel, plucking a piece of paper. She wrote her response. 

_Don’t worry,_ her note said, _I won’t let you fall_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Shakespeare thing was inspired by a true story from my beloved bestfriend, who I love so very dearly. Haha. Let me know what y'all think of this chappie! Personally, I loved every word of it. Hope y'all do too! :)


	8. What We Don’t Say

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben was convinced there were moments where you’d feel like you were standing on the cliff’s edge—not literally, just in your mind—and you’d be forced to make a decision. It was like a fork-in-the-road sort of thing, except a little more extreme. You didn’t know if you’d get skewered by jagged, sharp spires at the bottom or the endless crash of cresting waves all around you—you didn’t even know if you’d be able to just… fly off the edge if you truly took the plunge. 
> 
> This was a little like that, well, a lot actually, because he was that boy on the cliff and her world was the churning sea of uncertainty and the endless sky of hope. It was only a matter of which one she’d allow him to. 
> 
> Ben didn’t want to be afraid today. He was crippled by fear before, and he found he never really liked it. So how about just… embracing it? The way Rey did all the time? 
> 
> Taking a shaky breath, he asked: “Are you coming to church tomorrow?” 
> 
> The question took her by surprise. Churning sea or endless sky? He wondered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y’all may not realize it but my word limit for each chapter is usually just around the 2k to 3k range. I’m saying this because this chapter went a little over that limit (4k) and I feel like the following chapters are going to get longer when I find that a chapter needs to be wrapped in one go. The chapter nine draft is already a 6k behemoth that I have to cut down. I just felt like I needed to add in the heads up just in case some of you do notice in the future that they have become longer.
> 
> Hopefully, this chapter will flow smoothly enough you won’t even notice how many words are in it. <3 Let me know what y’all think in the comments below!! 
> 
> Mood music for this chapter: ["Here in My Arms"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpkuroe8j5U&app=desktop) by Leon Bridges & ["Baby I’m Yours"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMHKugCs9BU&app=desktop) by Arctic Monkeys ("Baby I'm Yours" especially gives off young Ben in love vibes :D)

Ben’s father could do a good many things but he did his best work at the chop shop he’d started running since he settled down—finally—in Alderaan. A scrap metal paradise he ran with his life-long partner in crime, Chewbacca. Ben never quite figured out if that was his actual name or if his parents had just been the eccentric, trolling kind. He wondered about the grizzled man’s birth some time ago in… in… Well, he didn’t have a very clear grasp on Chewie’s age. It was like he’d been alive forever, what with his face being one of the first he’d ever seen when he came into the world. 

Chewie “been-around-forever” greeted him when he came to the chop shop one slow-moving Saturday. Poe had a family thing with relatives out of town who Mr. Dameron wanted to see and Ben had already finished most of his homework due for next week anyway. He’d finished extra early, in fact, thanks to his butterfly-filled stomach keeping him up all night until the back of his eyes hurt from keeping them open too long. 

_ I won’t let you fall. _

He fell asleep a little past 4AM only for a rude awakening two and a half hours later courtesy of his mother asking him to bring his father some soup for breakfast. 

At the chop shop, he stared at the cars, rusting powdery hulking things, skeletal versions of their past selves. He’d come here every once in a while, though he didn’t make it a habit. It smelled repulsive almost all the time; stinking like motor oil, mud, wet rust, and burned rubber. The challenge he’d give himself, while looking at the numerous spare parts he couldn’t name, was to write something about this place. Make it beautiful in the span of less than a thousand words and look at it that way for a little while. It didn’t change the fact that the place looked like it was barely holding onto itself, but it eased the boredom Ben felt when he had to wait for his father in his dusty, sparse “office” during afternoons when dealers dropped by the shop to haggle for parts. 

Ben didn’t have an affinity with these things, declining his father’s invitations each time. He wasn’t as well-versed in the art of haggling as his father was. 

Today was not so different; Ben sat in his father’s little cove of an office tucked away at the end of a line of stripped-bare cars and shoved, almost, to the very back of the warehouse, shaded by a ripped tarp that was clearly white then but now no one could tell. Han had equally dusty shelves holding various kinds of metal equipment and a floor nobody bothered to sweep. The drawers, when pulled back, protested under any kind of force, as if years of disuse and desolate ruin had weighed down on its metal slides. Even the papers inside looked glum, typewritten text on the face of each page squeezed between starchy folders. 

Despite the state of it all—which could admittedly be better—Han kept it running, accepting clients and car enthusiasts who did business with Han because he knew what he was doing. Ben was pretty sure that half the stuff he did in the chop shop was illegal—a ballsy move considering he was married to a strict saint of a woman—but it showed Ben that people cared about a whole bunch of things other than God. Which was something of an odd epiphany to have at 8:30 in the morning, still yawning and hoping the early-morning negotiations between his father and that Bala Tik would just end already. 

But the person outside did not sound like Bala Tik anymore and—when had it changed? He pushed the tarp to the side and heard the crunch of his footsteps making contact with the dirt under his shoes. The inside of the warehouse had a sepia glow to it, and maybe it was the heat seeping through the roof and making the cars smell like a whole metal oven, but he knew his eyes would never lie to him when it came to her. 

“Here’s Chewie’s: an extra large sloppy-sloppy quarter pounder. We call it sloppy twice because it’s _ that _ sloppy!” She declared, a wide grin stretching on her face. 

From the greasy paper bag, she pulled out what looked like a rather hefty burger, the dark stains around the circumference of it matching the ones on the bag. She pulled another wrapped sandwich, too, this one elongated and had fewer stains. 

“For you, here’s a simple chicken sandwich with my mom’s secret sauce in it,” she said conspiratorially, winking. 

He wondered if he’d ever get tired of that insanely expressive face she had, or if he’d forever stand and watch her and feel like he could watch a thousand expressions pass across her face and never grow tired of it. 

“If you must know, my sweet, caring wife even made me soup this morning so I’m feeling pretty pampered—oh, have you met my son, Ben?” He asked, extending one arm out and gesturing for Ben to step closer. Han held him with that man-touch guys liked giving each other: a hand resting on the shoulder. 

“Ben, meet—“ 

“Rey,” said Ben, catching a whiff of coconuts when she tucked a loose tendril of hair behind her ear. She was wearing her hair down today and had a light sweater on the color of black coffee. He didn’t realize he liked the look until he saw a small barrette on one side of her head, simple, black, and kept her hair from getting into her eyes. 

“You kids been acquainted?” Han queried. 

“At school, dad. We’re in the same grade.” 

She nodded, gaze momentarily shifting to Han before coming back to Ben. “He doused himself in your cologne, Mr. Solo.”

Acute shame filled his veins then and there was so much of it that he felt like it was physically clogging his throat, burning his cheeks from the inside and licking all the way up to his ears. He cleared his throat with difficulty, throwing her a reproachful look. 

“Paco Rabanne? How?” Han asked, his one bushy arm flexing as he unwrapped the grease-stained paper around the sandwich to bite into it. Ben looked at his baby hair-covered arms and idly wondered if they’d look like his father’s in the future. 

Rey’s smile grew more coquettish. There was that glint to it similar to the time she saw him crouched behind the tree smelling like a lady repellant. He’d take it in stride if his father weren’t here, who, by the way, was not letting this piece of information go. 

So Rey continued and Ben suppressed the urge to facepalm. “I think he just wanted to get in good with his lady.” 

Besmirched, then, was his urge to facepalm; but his guard was still up. She continued. “It was a blunder, for sure, but eventually we fixed it.” 

“Fixed it?” 

“Yeah. I brought him up to give him something to change in. And as far as I know, he told me never to speak of it again,” she finished, winking mischievously at Ben, who found that he actually didn’t feel as embarrassed as he thought he’d be. Was he finally outgrowing the ever-constant urge to turn beet red at everything this girl said? Was it finally over? 

Han had to go and bulldoze that, of course, the way he’d been told all Solo men did, by saying: “Well, if he keeps up wearing that, he might attract all the women in his mother’s church group!” 

_ Aaand it was back. _ His whole face heated up at the mention of it and all he wanted to do was catch just a glimpse of a grassy patch somewhere to promptly stick his head into the ground like an ostrich. 

“It wasn’t all bad,” she replied, the bag crunching in her hand, brown paper creasing in her fingers. Beneath her long, thin lashes, she looked at him—almost shyly, almost secretly. Ben was struck with the familiar urge to know what she was thinking. 

“But if I hadn’t come in, he would have been embarrassed out of his mind.” 

Ben winced. Han scoffed, scratching a gunky fingernail behind his ear. His hair had grown long since his last visit to the barber shop and the sandy-blonde quality of it, shot through with little strands of silver hair, reminded Ben that his father was not getting any younger.

“You’re damn right.” He swallowed the bite he was just chewing. “You kids keep talking. Leia also brought me soup today so I think I’ll guzzle that down-” he lifted the sandwich- “and this, of course. Thank you, Rey, and tell Maz to fire her son of a bitch chef. You make better chicken sandwiches than him.” 

Once Ben was sure his father had disappeared into his back office, he turned to Rey, intending to reprimand her, but found he was curious about her sandwich instead. 

_ I make many things! _

Maybe this was one of them. 

“You made that sandwich?” He asked. 

“Yeah—it’s not a big deal. I just cook sometimes. Bogs teaches me. That’s our chef. And he’s not a son of a bitch like Han said,” she laughed, clasping her hands in front of her and stretching it. She yawned, too, which then made Ben yawn, his eyes misting a little. 

Ben looked at her bag. “You’ve got another one.” 

“Oh! Yeah!” He admitted that he liked being able to read the emotions on her face. That, as she procured a sandwich from the poor bag, he liked that he could see her pride and happiness on display. 

_ I like where I am when I’m with you. _ He suppressed the strong urge to blush again, which, he actually did not know how to do? How did blushes work again? You don’t know you have them until you do? 

Rey finally took out the last wrapped burger from the bottom of the bag, proudly presenting it to Ben. It was half the size of the sloppy-sloppy quarter pounder and had its own grease stains only because it had sat so closely with the other burgers. When he didn’t move to take it, she wiggled it in front of his face. 

This time, he was careful not to touch her hand, unsure about how he would feel if he did. 

“Do you want me to…” 

“Try it, yeah.” 

“Okay.” He felt a little awkward standing here with Rey watching him, but then realized he’d done the same to her for the past few weeks and decided to just take a bite out of the burger—only for his eyes to roll back into his head at the taste of it. 

“Oh my god.”

“It’s good, right?”

“Mm-hm. Itsh sho goodf.” He gulped. “So good.” 

Rey giggled, shaking her head at him playfully. He realized then that he had never heard her giggle before but now that he had, he decided he liked the sound of it. 

“What’s in this?” He asked, after yet another mouthful that had his taste buds rejoicing. 

Voice turning bashful, she twirled a lock of hair. Ben’s eyes flitted to the chestnut tresses. “It’s a secret.” 

Ben was convinced there were moments where you’d feel like you were standing on the cliff’s edge—not literally, just in your mind—and you’d be forced to make a decision. It was like a fork-in-the-road sort of thing, except a little more extreme. You didn’t know if you’d get skewered by jagged, sharp spires at the bottom or the endless crash of cresting waves all around you—you didn’t even know if you’d be able to just… fly off the edge if you truly took the plunge. 

This was a little like that, well, a _ lot _actually, because he was that boy on the cliff and her world was the churning sea of uncertainty and the endless sky of hope. It was only a matter of which one she’d allow him to. 

Ben didn’t want to be afraid today. He was crippled by fear before, and he found he never really liked it. So how about just… embracing it? The way Rey did all the time? 

Taking a shaky breath, he asked: “Are you coming to church tomorrow?” 

The question took her by surprise. Churning sea or endless sky? He wondered. 

After a while, she smiled. “Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.” 

Endless sky. 

Ben released a short burst of a chuckle that sounded like a cough. He cleared his throat, scratching the back of his head. He stared at the half-eaten burger in his hand and remembered it was hers. 

“Shit, uhm, here’s your burger. I’m sorry for eating so much of it.”

“It’s alright.” She took the burger without preamble, biting into the part he’d also sunk his teeth into and he blushed. Poe always went on about indirect kisses, if he really thought about it, _ that _ was definitely an indirect kiss. 

“See you tomorrow, Ben!” She called, before packing her burger back in the paperbag and riding off into the distance. 

Han emerged from the back then, hands shiny with grease and oil, standing beside his son to watch her go. 

“She going to church tomorrow?” 

“Yes.” 

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” 

“_ Dad. _” 

The awkward guy-touch came back, but this time it came with a light pat on his back. “Just remember your mother signed you up to pray for tithes tomorrow.” He said, humming into the chicken sandwich. 

Ben blanched. “What?” 

Han shrugged. “She said she wanted to surprise you.” 

_ Shit. _He was surprised, alright. “What the fuck…” he mumbled under his breath. 

Han wagged a finger in Ben’s face. “Language, son.” 

He was screwed. A whole congregation listening to his every word and he’d made the mistake of inviting Rey. _ Shit, shit _ , _ shit. _

* * *

Ben was convinced nothing was worse than getting thrust into a role he didn’t want to play. Sure, his Christian upbringing had given him the ability to spitball the tithe prayer easily enough, but it was different now that Rey was going to be listening to it. All that grand talk about taking the leap and that sea and sky analogy had faded in the background as thick teenage embarrassment coiled around him. 

He dawdled to a sitting position when Leia woke him up the following day, a stark contrast to the quickening pace of his heart and the thousands of synapses in his head firing all at once to try and get him through the day. 

It was like one of those speedy animations where the main character would wake up, get dressed, and get to where they needed to go all in the span of five seconds. It felt like that because before he knew it, his hair was freshly parted, gelled down, and his crisp beige button-down was hanging off his frame like it never left the hanger. 

His brain floated in a sea of cold dread and the fear that came with something so nerve-wracking as public speaking. And Rey wasn’t even here yet! Maybe he was scared she wouldn’t be. But wasn’t he scared she _ would _ be? Or did he really just want to make these people not question his love for Jesus? Whatever the hell it was, he hated that he had to feel it so early in the morning. 

He still had to get it over with, of course, no matter that the Millers’ son Brian scurried on bent knees to where he sat to remind him that, oh, and he needed to do the verses that come with the prayer, too, and that oh, here was a copy of it to help him out. 

Not much help but he’d take it. As he took to the stage and opened the rustic bible that the church prided itself on for saving from the last storm that destroyed half the building, he cleared his throat nervously, his fingers shaking on the brittle pages. 

“S-saint Luke once said,” he paused, the sound of him turning the page reverberating loudly against the walls. The mic was bent too close to the book and he felt a little like he needed to bring it closer to his lips, thought that would only make him _ more _ nervous because then he was going to have to _ hear _ himself through the sound system, and so didn’t change a thing on the birch lectern. 

His underarms felt tacky and that Axe cologne did nothing for him at all. Why did people keep using it? He cleared his throat, having already kept the room too silent as he ruminated on overrated colognes. His mother was seated on the middle row looking expectantly at him, while his father’s brows met like he was waiting for the world to finally make sense. 

Ben cleared his throat again. It was just _ one line, _ Ben, _ one verse _. He took a deep breath, his lips trembling and the bottom part of his head flooded in cold dread.

He didn’t even get enough sleep to be doing all this. “Saint Luke once said that- that, uhm. In chapter sixteen verse ten that…” 

No one wouldn’t have heard the door creak. For all the weightiness of it, it carried no sound when it was opened: opened now with Rey standing beyond. She slunk inside quietly before she looked up from her side of the room straight at him. She crossed her arms, the sketchbook hanging off her grip. She raised her brow at him, urging him to continue. _ Verse ten _, his mind screamed at him; he still had a job to do. 

“W-whoever can be trusted with very little…” she sat cross-legged at the center, “...can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little…” 

The pages ruffled before he could read the rest of it. His brows creased heavily, sweat pooling down the slope of his back. What was that page again? And why did the bible have to be so goddamn thick? 

Rey raised her hands slightly from where she sat, gesturing to her mouth. In his mind, he assembled the the words she mouthed to him. 

“W-will… also be… dishonest… with m-much.” He finished with a sigh that for some might mirror the relief devout Christians claimed feeling whenever they finished a line in scripture; to Ben it was more a relief of being rid of it. 

“Please join me in a word of prayer,” he uttered next as the whole congregation bowed and closed their eyes. 

“Heavenly Father,” he began, though his eyes were open and locked onto Rey’s, which were gray today and reflected the rose window above them, the only witness to their exchange. “We thank you for giving us more than enough every day of our lives. Our promise to you is that, should you entrust us with very little instead, we will also have the strength to maintain it.” 

Ben’s cheeks were already hurting from smiling so much when he said the last line. “We shall commit to you what you have so gladly bestowed us and blessed us with so generously. This we ask through Christ, our Lord, amen.” 

“Amen,” she echoed quietly. 

“Amen,” he replied. 

* * *

The day flew by pretty tame after those tense ten minutes that he spoke at the podium. Pastor Robert lauded him for a job well done and his father tried to hide how much he thought the same way, too. Ben could see it in his eyes and knew that Han just wasn’t that type of person. That was fine. He might not always get his father’s car talk, but he always picked up when Han swelled with pride for his son. 

Leia was more up front about the whole thing, smiling and gesturing him over and kissing the top of his head and telling him how proud Jesus would be, or the Holy Trinity or whatever. Grandma Padmé was there, too, her wrinkled lips curled into a smile and sharp eyes shining. Some people around the pews greeted him with compliments about his beautiful prayers, although Ben wished they’d just cool it on the part where they compared other ‘ungodly’ kids his age to him. 

He couldn’t pretend to care about the compliments and praises (after the comparison part, none of it felt genuine). All he wanted to do was see if _ she _ was still there or if she chose to steal away again and make him wait some more. 

Except she was there, sitting cross-legged like she was before and giving him a thumbs up. He responded with his own. 

The service officially ended seconds before 11AM, the big hand shifting into position just as a tiny storm of giggly, squealy children burst through the adjacent door on the other side of the main church building. Ben stopped on the steps to avoid the sea of stubby arms and sticky fingers. Eventually, his mother demanded he move to the side beside the flower pot with the parched-looking soil and asked if he could wait there. 

And like clockwork since the last time he’d seen her here, the children tumbled and tripped all over themselves to get to Rey first, who was standing expectantly on the front lawn. A small, determined little girl was the first one to reach her, who then scooped her up and asked about her day with Jesus. 

It was the same broken record “I learned a lot about Jesus today!” accompanied by a printed drawing of whatever part of the bible was in discussion at Sunday school today. But Rey asked about it like she cared anyway, and it greatly pleased the kids to no end, not to mention their parents. 

An internal debate had just ended in his head, and the side that so very enthusiastically clamored for more interactions with Rey emerged victorious. He wove through the little crowd to get to Rey, tapping her shoulder. 

“I believe this kid’s name is Molly,” he muttered, unsure of what else to do. The girl heard her name and turned her attention to him, raising a hand in the air so gregariously that Rey’s face was almost hit with her small hand. 

“That’s me!” Molly exclaimed, her short black hair bobbing slightly as she giggled. What was it with kids and their constant laughter? 

“And what about him? Who do you think he is?” Rey pointed to Ben, the soft tone of her voice calming Molly somewhat. She blinked a few times and clenched and unclenched her tiny hand. 

“He’s Benny!”

Oh, boy. He looked timidly at Rey who, true to form, wore a grin of morbid curiosity on her face. “Benny?” 

“Yeah! He was our teacher last year! He was really bad at it!” 

Rey tilted her head at Molly. “Was he? How come?” 

“He told us to write words and didn’t give us crayons.” 

The slapping sound came from his hand hitting his forehead. Rey chuckled. “What words did you write?” 

“Nothing. I wanted to color Moses’ elephants!” 

“What color?”

“Pink!” 

Ben rolled his eyes. “There are no pink elephants in the wild.” 

Rey’s smile only grew wider. She was looking at Molly but Ben felt distinctly like the conversation was theirs too. 

“How about some pink pops?” 

Molly’s eyes brightened. “Pops?” 

“Yes! Look over there at mommy—“ 

“Pops!” Molly squirmed in Rey’s grip, insisted to be put down, and bolted away as fast as her little legs could take her. She buckled and hit the grass face first and started bawling, but her mother was quick to sweep her up and drop a loud kiss on her forehead. Some of the kids around her had cleared out with only a few shyly asking if they, too, could be carried by Rey. 

Their mothers and fathers saved Rey from the gaggle of little boys and girls, waving goodbyes to their friends and clutching the folded Jesus drawings in their bags. 

Han, from a distance, gestured for Ben to come back but he shook his head. Leia was talking about bible study again with her friends, which meant Ben had at least twenty to thirty minutes to spare. Something he planned on not wasting. Rey must have had the same idea because she started talking first. 

“I think you did a great job, by the way. I’ll bet Jesus was really proud of you.” 

He scratched at the itchy, starchy collar, setting the top button of his shirt loose. 

“I’d have been sent back to Sunday school if it weren’t for you.” 

“Is that bad?” At first, Ben thought she was kidding, but the curious look on her face told him she really didn’t know. 

He grinned. “Yes. Yes, it is. Kids never shut up. They ask too many questions. The last time I was assigned to teach—which I should never do again, ever—one kid asked me if Jesus wiped his own ass or if he waited for his mom to clean him up.” 

Rey snort-laughed. “Did he?” 

“Unfortunately, Jesus’ ass-wiping history did not make an appearance in the bible so it’s anyone’s guess.” 

“Then what did you tell the kid?” 

“That Jesus did because ‘cleanliness is next to godliness.’” 

Rey punched him lightly on the shoulder, over the shirt, of course, but the slight contact made him shudder a bit. It was hot out. 

“That cannot be real.” 

“It was. Teacher Sonny didn’t like it.” 

“Who’s that?”

“One of the teachers. He wears an apron.” 

“But did _ they _ have a theory?” 

Ben shook his head no. 

“I mean, he was one hundred percent man, one hundred percent God. If I could believe that he could cast demons and send them to pigs and drown them in the sea, then I can believe he wiped his own ass.” 

“You said you weren’t a Christian, then how come you know things like that? And that verse?”

“Orphanages are obsessed with Christian values. They taught so much stuff. I read a child’s bible once. It was very well illustrated. I liked it. I felt the designs were quirky.” 

Ben shuffled on his feet, scratching at the dried gel on his scalp. There went his effort to ward off dandruff. 

“Can I ask you something?” She inquired shortly after, waving absently at a leaving Molly. 

“Yeah, sure.” He muttered distractedly, head bowed and eyes focused on the white flake rainfall of dandruff he’d already scratched vigorously. He cringed. 

“How did you know you liked Bazine?” 

His eyes raised to meet hers as he tried to conjure a non-lame response to her question. He’d never had to revisit how it all happened before, it was such a long time ago. If he had to guess, he’d say he’d known he liked Bazine ever since that teeny tiny moment she used the water fountain at school before him. It was when he well and truly noticed her, the point in his life when he hadn’t stopped noticing her. 

“It… sounds weird but do you ever just… wake up one morning and feel like you like someone? Like life won’t ever be the same again because all of a sudden, when you’re with this person, everything feels brand new? And that all you want to do now is to be with them, no matter what?” 

_ Way to not give a non-lame response, Solo. _

Ben thought for sure this was the part Rey was going to laugh in his face and leave him an anxious ball of mess. She didn’t answer right away, her lips curling up to one side in thought. She bit her bottom lip, searching his eyes. 

He didn’t know what she was looking for, or if she was looking for something at all. The moment passed and she breathed softly out of her nose. “I like someone, too.” 

“Really? Who do you like?” 

“Hmmm. I’m not gonna say. But I think it’s gonna take a while.” She rocked on her heels and stared at the way her toes pressed up against the front of her shoes.

“Why?” 

“I just got to talking to him.” 

“He must be lucky then,” he replied, glancing at the small wet patch that had formed on the side of her white Toms slip-on shoes from the dewy grass. 

“Yeah.” She all but whispered and when she looked up, Ben swore he could see himself reflected in her eyes. “Very lucky, I guess.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course it had to be Saint Luke in there. Haha. Oh, and fun fact, the Jesus wiping his ass curiosity was a real question my cousin once asked his Dad at a Christening ceremony. It was even more hilarious to hear it in person and is one of my most treasured memories. 
> 
> I hope you liked yet more fluff e u e my, my, will ever stop having this much fluff?


	9. A Long-Held Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He could already see it: Bazine in the middle of the dance floor draped in gold and beckoning with her eyes for him to move closer. Is he wearing a mask in this fantasy? Is the student council finally going to go with the masquerade ball theme? Does any of that matter when Ben is finally face-to-face with actual, tangible proof that he and Bazine could sort of, maybe, possibly be a thing? 
> 
> Bazine nodded, and for a moment every eye on the table was turned to him. They probably all knew how this worked—he himself knew it. The boys that came before him always asked and always went above and beyond to get her to the dance. And he’d need to continue their legacy. 
> 
> Who cares about who Rey hung out with? Ben could have Bazine hanging off his arm, could finally boast to the entire school that he—the boy they all said would never be able to get with the popular girl—_actually got the girl._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand I’m back! *victory poses in front of my computer while sitting down* 
> 
> First, I want to apologize for being gone for almost a month. I had a slight depressive episode when I went on a job hunt. Boy, it sure taxes you, doesn’t it? The rejections (though you know it’s all professional) stayed with me and I felt really down. I couldn’t get in the mood to write at all. Anw, I managed to bounce right back though, thanks to binge-watching the entire Kroll Show about two times and laughing my ass off from “Oh, Hello,” not to mention THAT TRAILER. And so, here it is, Chapter 9 for y’all. Those of you who are still here, still waiting on our little Ben and Rey to get together, thank you so much! My heart goes out to y’all. <3
> 
> I would also like to thank MissFable on Discord for being such a gracious reference/consultant for this chapter. A Queen! 
> 
> Mood Music for this chapter: [In Your Dreams](https://open.spotify.com/track/0HcSOf5djY7EAiYAWY1aA1) by Stevie Nicks

Save for the days that Bazine would come to school acting colder than usual, everything was relatively normal. In fact, it was the utter normalcy of it all that bothered him. He kept waiting to feel nervous and for his heart to pump as erratically as much as it did before whenever Bazine took those steps to the school entrance where he waited for her. It still did, but it grew dull, like he’d had a heart transplant some time during the week and this new one wasn’t working properly. 

_ I like someone, too. _

Who was it? He looked around and studied the faces of his schoolmates, looking for someone who might look like Rey liked them. Which was ridiculous, but he did it anyway. It was laughable, this attempt to deduce from pure facial observation if someone here looked like Rey’s type—he didn’t even _ know _ Rey’s type. And why did it even matter who Rey’s type was? Was she even the kind of girl to _ have _a type, or was she one of those girls who said stuff like “I don’t have a type” unironically? 

_ I just got to talking to him. _

It probably felt to her like the most normal thing to do at the time, which is probably why Ben didn’t think too much when she asked about his feelings for Bazine. He’d answered that easily enough, if inelegantly. He reminded himself they weren’t _ friends _ friends. She was just a girl he talked to on the occasion who made amazing sandwiches, drew magnificent pointillism illustrations, and made Ben envious with her resilience and mental fortitude. It certainly had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was like sunshine incarnate, or that he’d written the words “tan skin” one too many times and didn’t think of Bazine. 

What if he just wanted to be friends with her? What if that was what was going on? When was the last time he actually _ made _a friend other than Poe and Hux? He couldn’t remember. After Bazine, it was like everything was haloed in a vignette whenever he looked at her. No one else mattered. 

He slipped Bazine’s book bag from his shoulder and wordlessly waved her goodbye as she settled in class. She gave him a small nod, rendered silent when she wasn’t gossiping or picking apart their classmate’s lives or appearances with Heather and Sadie. 

He didn’t have enough time to make sense of his emotions for now; English class was waiting. 

* * *

Rey smiled at him languidly and again, he was struck by how normal that was, too, despite the weird feeling in the pit of his stomach that perhaps up was down and down was up and Ben was maybe way too interested with who this girl’s crush was. The way he sat down beside her? Normal. Down to the way she tilted her head in acknowledgment with the same ghost of a smile on her lips whenever he came in. 

“Did you know we were going to study Sappho today? Her works have inspired me a lot.”

“Yeah?” She didn’t say it as much as she vocalized the sound of it in a groggy, slightly raspy way. Then, she cleared her throat. “How so?”

“Well, she led the charge of subjective poetry in ancient Greece when a lot of poets would rather focus their attention on external events outside themselves. Sappho, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of putting her feelings and struggles in her poetry and was eventually recognized around Greece as ‘the Tenth Muse’— I’m sorry, I just like her a lot.” Bashful, he sat down. 

"Don't apologize, that sounds... great,” she whispered, blinking twice and rubbing her left eye. Sitting more closely to her like this, with their seats huddled together, he noted the tired lines under her eyes, her flaky lips that looked both plump and dry at the same time. 

Ben’s fingers itched to check her temperature by touching her neck, an impulse, really, borne of the fact that Ben himself was once a sickly child who often caught colds. 

Rey looked like she had a cold. She looked like she rolled out of bed this morning moaning in her sandpaper voice and shuffling around in a blanket she’d draped around herself. 

He felt for the hoodie he brought along and offered it to her. It was the comfiest one he owned, cotton-soft and lined with fleece inside. She reluctantly curled her slim fingers around the fabric, mumbling a quiet thanks. 

Rey slid her arms in his jacket and pulled the collar close to her face. He couldn’t remember the last time he lent his clothes to anyone. The jacket was a little too big for her, the sleeves extending two to three inches away from the tips of her fingers and the hem reaching halfway through the length of her plaid skirt. She was practically swimming in it. 

Her sneeze caught him by surprise, a small squeak of a sound followed by an incredibly displeased groan. 

“Why do you already have a cold? It’s barely the middle of September.” 

“It’s close. I’m sensitive to weather changes.” 

“Huh.” 

She sneezed again, bringing her sleeve-clad hands to her nose, red and, he imagined, probably stuffy. He wanted to reach out and pat her back or give her a snug hug instead of a jacket. Instead, he stayed rooted in his seat, entirely too awkward to do any of those things. 

Mrs. Hahn turned to write on the chalkboard as soon as she entered the classroom, wasting no time in announcing today’s activity. She asked them to partner up and write an essay about Sappho’s poetry. That was easy enough. It was the second part of the activity he dreaded, the dragging moments he scanned the room for a prospective partner. Someone from the back waved at him, and he was about to stand up when he remembered Rey. Sickly, silent little Rey with her cheek pressed into her arms and her eyes blinking slowly. 

She must really be out of it. Was he really going to do this? He shrugged. Might as well. It would be futile to pretend now that he didn’t like her to some extent. Maybe if he just leaned into it, he’d outgrow the magnetic charm she possessed. 

He rested a hand calmly on her shoulder, which made her look up, snuffling. “Mmh?” 

“You want to be partners?” He asked, after shaking his head at his other classmates. Rey’s answer was a small nod. He pulled his seat and desk close to her, the latter he lined up with hers. At the satisfying bump of the wood, she chuckled breathily. Ben looked at her. 

“What?” 

“If I move the table a little, would it bother you?” 

“What do you mean?” 

Rey nudged one desk leg with her feet to push it off infinitesimally—so small a difference one would even say they didn’t see where it slid out of alignment. Ben squirmed for a split-second before tugging it back. Rey laughed into the crook of her arm where the fabric bunched up, eyes twinkling up at him like stars. 

“You’re so cute.” That, too, was muttered into his jacket, so quiet and tender he strained to hear it. How did she do that? Say those things like it genuinely didn’t bother her to do it, like unprompted, candid honesty was the easiest fucking thing in the world? 

“I- uh, thanks I guess,” he replied, distracting himself by rooting around in his bag for his English textbook—which was on his desk. He was in mid-turn when Rey tapped his shoulder and pointed at it, the page already turned to Sappho’s brief biography. 

Ben sat back up like nothing happened, at least he tried to. It was hard to do when Rey looked like all she wanted to do was burst out laughing, but he persevered.

They shared Ben’s book by placing it in the middle of the two joined desk, jotting down notes every now and again for things they were catching. He was halfway through a paragraph about Sappho’s lyricism when he found himself distracted by the tippy tap of Rey’s shoes on the floor. She was still resting her chin on her forearms, half of her torso pressed up against the desk. Ben observed her carefully from the corner of his eyes, noting her sunken eyes and the glazed over stare. Her arms were limp and weak, he could tell; they slumped and gave tiny spasms whenever she wrote something. 

“Rey?” He said, twisting in his seat to turn to her. She glanced at him. Without saying a word, he raised his forearm and awkwardly placed the back of his hand on her smooth forehead. Her skin was hot. 

“Are you sure you’re okay? Should I take you to the clinic?” He glimpsed the hall pass hanging on a hook by the chalkboard, its laminated surface reflecting light from outside. Rey coughed quietly into his jacket, raspily insisting she was fine. But Ben would not believe it—not when she seemed to look weaker every passing moment. 

“Do you have tonsillitis?” 

Rey brows furrowed. “No.” 

“Have you been sleeping late recently?” 

“Ben,” she chuckled, waving him off 

“Did you remember what you ate eight hours ago?”

“Ben,” she repeated with a firmness this time, tight-lipped. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ll be fine. Let’s just finish this essay, alright? Mrs. Hahn said it’s due Wednesday so that gives us two days. Let’s try to finish it today.” 

“Right, right,” he nodded, determined. Rey was very obviously sick, but if she didn’t want to go to the clinic, Ben felt he had no right to force her. At least, he was able to lend her his jacket. 

* * *

Come gym class, a bunch of rowdy seniors were jostling and bumping into each other’s shoulders. Homecoming was almost upon them and, apparently, mandatory monkey-howling the school’s team name was part of the big event. He’d rather stay at home and write poetry on his bed than sit on mildly biting cold bleachers cheering about men bulldozing each other to the ground. Of course, this meant that he also had to worry about the _ other _ part of homecoming: the dance. 

That, at least, he could enjoy—if standing off the side and being a fly on the wall counted as “enjoyment”—as he watched every person in the room his age try and fail to follow the moves to basic waltz. Everything would be different now. Bazine was here and he was going to do everything he could to change his homecoming dance fate. Maybe if he and Bazine danced on the dance floor, people around them wouldn’t think they were probably just faking it. 

Coach Steve ran to his side of the gym, calling him down for a game. Now was the time, then, but when someone yelled “Dodge Ball” and Coach Steve unfortunately agreed way too cheerfully, Ben stepped back a couple of yards to try and avoid having his long, very-much-a-target body from, well, being a target. From this distance, he could see everyone better, even the team captain Dylan, who chose him to be on his team for God knows what reason. It was only now that he noticed Bazine was on the other team. 

As team captain. 

She shot him a smug look, playing with the red ball in hand. He gulped. How was pitting kids against each other legal in this place? At the sound of the whistle, Ben’s senses became fully alert, helping him duck a ball that nearly clipped his head. Heather had thrown the ball, laughing and smiling innocently at him. Sadie wasn’t on the team because of her asthma, so she was sat on the bleachers in Bazine’s side of the court, waving two plastic pom-poms and cheering them on. 

“_ Fuck, _” he muttered, keeping an eye on the red ball barrage. His long legs made running around difficult. His awkwardly long limbs and extremely low stamina meant he was already getting winded not five minutes into the game. His hair, slightly longer now, flopped and formed a curtain in front of his eyes. He cursed some more. 

The two dodgeball teams were divided into two and grouped on opposite sides of the centerline of the basketball court. Poe was on Bazine’s team for some reason, and when their eyes met, Poe drew his arm back to aim the ball at Ben. The throw was blessedly weak and bounced meekly a meter away from him. 

His eyes shot up again when Jessie from his team shouted “Out!” after hitting Riza on the other team, who promptly spent all of her abrupt exit by flipping everyone off. Coach Steve flagged her for behavior but it was silly because she was already out. Now that someone had been plucked out, the game really started to heat up. He could feel it underneath his shirt, too, where a pool of sweat on his concave lower back was seeping into the garter of his shorts. His heart pounded a mile a minute, and never once did he doubt that this was all, indeed (as he struggled to catch his breath every five goddamn seconds), “torture olympics.” 

Bazine took her cue, picking off two members of his team at the same time: Ramsay, who she aimed at first, and Patricia, who was standing next to him. They toppled dramatically into each other and Patricia shoved Ramsay hard on the chest. The ball landed squarely on Ramsay’s chest before falling into Patricia’s lap. Bazine threw two clenched fists up in the air just before Coach Steve blew the whistle. “Patricia, Ramsay, out.” 

At this point, Ben was merely keeping alive on his team by ducking and jumping and frantically tracking every ball he could see soaring in the air. It wouldn’t be long until he slipped up completely. He was rapidly running out of breath, a burden now that he realized the adrenaline rush he’d been waiting for never actually came. 

He didn’t notice the side door of the gym open until it did, with Rey stepping inside. He froze and watched her sit down somewhere in the middle row of the bleachers, far enough away from the carnage but close enough to take in the damage. His eyes zeroed in on the game, but he was thrown off a little now, his mind distracted by two things at once. Poe yelled “Heads Up!” from his side of the gym and Ben realized he was going all-out on hitting him with the ball. 

“What the hell, Poe?!” He yelled throwing a ball back Poe’s way. His bad aim only got the ball almost-hit Poe’s left foot. The move proved critical, especially since he left himself open for a couple of seconds. Bazine saw the opening and threw a ball at him, but he was lucky enough to catch sight of it and wobble to the side with an indignant yelp. 

Ben’s breath came out hard and fast as he crouched low and took massive strides in a zig-zag pattern on the court. There were five people left up front, agilely gliding and avoiding hits. He was very nearly hit a couple of times himself, but the strategy of weaving around from behind his other team members seemed to be working. 

The side door opened a fraction later and Ben could see another student saunter in. He knew this guy. The expensive cologne guy, Mr. Built-Jock. What was he doing here? Like the first time he saw him, Built-Jock was wearing his varsity jacket, the same color as the maroon walls around them. He skipped coolly up the steps before stopping completely in front of Rey. 

Ben could feel the creases forming on his forehead, suddenly unable to make out half the sounds on the gym floor he heard earlier just fine. His heart was still pounding, but now he wondered how each beat seemed to reverberate down to his fingers, and way, way close to his eardrums. 

If Dylan hadn’t whipped his head around to shout at him, Ben would have been hit by a fastball at the last minute from Nicholas. He angled and twisted his body away, turning his hip; it was not long after that that he felt the tell-tale bite of muscle pain. 

His eyes dropped back to Built-Jock, who was sitting beside Rey now, talking animatedly with her but with a concerned expression on his face. Rey nodded periodically, chuckling along with him as he moved his hands and gesticulated toward the game. Following his lead, Rey’s eyes drug from one side of the court to the other before finally landing her gaze upon Ben. 

Her eyes shone, her small hand lifting to wave at him. He waved back, but not before hearing Bazine squeal delightfully when Coach Steve blew the whistle and declared that another player on his team was out. 

_ Shit. _ That left three of them, much fewer than the people on Bazine’s team. 

Dylan was still on the team, while the rest of them spread out on the court to try and put as much distance as they could from each other. Hopefully, this way, they’ll be able to dodge the balls better. He really wished he had his one hundred percent in this game but as Built-Jock and Rey talked some more, all he could think about was them. 

In his slight distraction, Ben could have sworn they’d moved closer. For one thing, Rey was leaning her head against Built-Jock’s shoulder. He was whispering something to her about the game and she was laughing. Laughing like he hadn’t seen her do with him yet. A drop of sweat caught on his long lashes fell into his left eye, momentarily misting it. 

Poe screeched when Dylan’s hit landed smack-dab on the side of his face, disorienting him for a split second before he was fully able to hear Bazine’s instructions. With Heather right beside her, she nodded with a slight tilt of her head in Ben’s direction. Heather was only so happy to fix her eyes onto Ben, finally hitting him square on his rather disproportionately wide chest. 

The hit barely registered, neither did Dylan’s audible sigh when the coach announced that they lost, because the image of Built-Jock planting a chaste kiss on Rey’s forehead was now stamped into his brain. 

* * *

He reached Bazine’s table wondering why Sadie was fidgeting more than she usually was, the slight squeak of her thighs against the plastic seat grating on Bazine’s nerves until she slammed a hand down the table. 

“Talk,” she commanded, and it was like watching a dam break. 

“I’m so mad!” Sadie screeched, drawing half of the cafeteria’s attention before losing them in the next second. “That… that… _ girl _ ! How dare she talk to Finn when _ I _ saw him first?! It’s so not fair! How could he just— just— _ hang out _ with her when I’m literally _ right here _? I’ve been talking to him for the past week now. He even told me about his grandma! About how he was a swim team member at his previous school and why he transferred here. That’s rapport!” 

Bazine groaned, rolling her eyes. “He didn’t ask you out, did he?” 

“Well— well, I—“ 

Heather snickered. “That settles it. It’s fair game; right, Bazzie?” 

“Heather’s right,” Bazine agreed, crossing her legs under the table. “For example, Mr. Rogers has the ass of a person made for Lee jeans but I won’t go there, ew. But Finn? That’s a man if I’ve ever seen one.” She hummed, glancing furtively at the football member’s table to see if he was there. 

Ben knew he wasn’t especially… eye-catching. He had cymbals for ears and fingers that were going through an identity crisis (seriously, did they want to be meaty or bony?)—but this? It hurt. It hurt that Bazine talked about this Finn guy like he didn’t exist. He hadn’t seen this guy before but could already say for sure that he probably wouldn’t get along with him. As if that dude at the gym talking with Rey wasn’t enough, Bazine was talking about another guy here, too. 

Sadie made a sound in the back of her throat, disturbing their relative peace. Ben looked at where she and the rest of the table were looking, listening closely to Sadie introduce the man of the hour. 

Built-Jock. 

Finn. 

“That’s Finn?” He asked. 

Sadie swiveled her head so fast to glare at him Ben feared she might break it. “Are you kidding me? He’s literally all the girls have been talking about. He’s so dreamy. He’s nice, too; he agreed to be my Chem partner when I asked.” She sighed, resting her chin on her palm and following Finn’s slow steps to the front of the cafeteria 

He kept looking over his shoulder at the doors like he was waiting for someone. Curious, Bazine and the rest of the table eyed the door, too. 

Sadie groaned. “Should I just go over there and invite him at the table? Like, he’d literally be super grateful, I can tell; he’s one of the nice ones.”

“Sadie, honey, what did we just say? He’s not yours yet, it’s fair game.” 

“What?! No way! _ I _called dibs!” Sadie protested. 

“Well, _ I _ call dibs now, too.” Bazine snapped, just before the doors burst open and Ben saw the sleeves of his black jacket first, and then a torso, and then a face. 

Beside him, Bazine’s voice dropped an octave when Finn ran up to Rey and smiled at her. “He’s hanging out with that Bar Girl?” Bazine scoffed. “Is this a fucking joke? When did they even become _ friends _?

“That’s what I’ve been telling you guys! You never listen!” Sadie whined. Heather shushed her, taking her phone out of her pocket. She stared at the screen for a few seconds before typing something furiously. After a while, she looked up. 

“No relationship status. Maybe they’re keeping it low key?” Heather suggested. 

Bazine snatched Heather’s phone, looking at the screen herself. “Are we seriously debating if they’re dating? There’s no possible way.” 

Sure enough, there was no heart below Finn’s profile picture that indicated that he was off the market. 

Sadie made another indignant noise, her mouth hanging open as Finn swooped in to envelope Rey in a hug and ruffled her hair. 

“The absolute fucking _ nerve _ of this girl!” Sadie all but growled.

That same smile was back, that same laugh that Ben heard at the gym--a knife-twist to the chest. His heart felt like it was having a foot cramp and his jaw felt too tight. Again, why did it matter to him so much? This guy was probably who Rey was talking about, it had to be. Sadie said every girl had been going bonkers since Finn came along; Rey probably felt the same way. 

“Will you calm the fuck down, Sadie?” Bazine groaned, and although it wasn’t meant for Ben, he used those words to calm himself anyway. 

Bazine slid Heather’s phone back to her on the table and uncrossed her legs. She looked at Sadie with a smirk on her lips. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if Finn found out about our little Rey’s… unpleasant little secret?”

Quietly irate and trying desperately to hide it, Ben suggested, “He probably knows. If he didn’t, would he still be hanging out with her?” 

“Didn’t you _ stalk _ her? To figure it out?” Bazine quirked a brow at him. 

“I _ investigated. _” 

Finn and Rey have moved up a spot in line and Sadie leaned on her elbows on the table just to squint at them, as if doing so would force them apart. 

“I would kill to be taken to the fall dance by that hunk,” Bazine pouted and all Ben could do beside her was stammer his disagreement. That was _ his _ place, not Finn’s. 

“But _ I _wanted to take you to the dance. Aren’t we going together?” 

She turned to him, her black hair swishing to the side as she did. “Of course we are,” she said, all saccharine-sweetness. “But you haven’t exactly asked me yet, Benny. Do something special then _ maybe _ I’ll say yes.” 

“Really?” 

Bazine nodded. 

He could already see it: Bazine in the middle of the dance floor draped in gold and beckoning with her eyes for him to move closer. Is he wearing a mask in this fantasy? Is the student council finally going to go with the masquerade ball theme? Does any of that matter when Ben is finally face-to-face with actual, tangible proof that he and Bazine could sort of, maybe, _ possibly _ be a thing? 

Bazine nodded, and for a moment every eye on the table was turned to him. They probably all knew how this worked—he himself knew it. The boys that came before him always asked and always went above and beyond to get her to the dance. And he’d need to continue their legacy. 

Who cares about who Rey hung out with? Who cares about Mr. Built-Jock Finn and his perfect, sporty self? Ben could have Bazine hanging off his arm, could finally boast to the entire school that he—the boy they all said would never be able to get with the popular girl—actually _ got the girl _. 

“Something special?” He queried again, a thousand different gimmicks already running through his mind. Bazine smiled at him, and it made him forget for a moment what he’d been obsessing about since this morning. 

“I’ll make you feel so special.” The words left his mouth before he could stop it, and the accompanying dread he was expecting to feel when he braved reaching for Bazine’s hand on the table and kissing her soft knuckles was replaced with an unusual kind of bravery. 

He’ll show this Finn guy, as he kissed Bazine’s skin, he’ll say with his eyes, _ “She’s mine.” _ And apparently, it was a message that’ll carry itself to Rey, who was standing beside Finn and watching what he was doing, too. 

* * *

The fact was this: Rey liked Finn (obviously), and because his mind ran with the first raw impulse, he had basically arranged for himself a date to the fall dance on the fly. He wanted to forget all of it for a second; it was just his luck that Poe had to see all of it and wouldn’t stop harping about it during study hall, trying in vain to mask the excitement in his voice clearly not brought about by the history book open on the table. 

“_ Such _ a casanova. I’m telling you, you’ll grow into those Dumbo-ears and have everyone— _ everyone _—eating out of the palm of your hand. I can already see it.” He said. Ben couldn’t picture it, this version of him Poe was talking about—it made him queasy. It bothered him that every guy who saw the stunt he pulled at the cafeteria were cheering him on for doing what he did and yet he couldn’t share in their excitement. 

“Am I broken?” He asked offhandedly, a strange question, really; Poe scrunched his nose. 

“I’m sorry, what?” 

“I mean, all the guys are excited for me—“

“_ Duh _.” 

“But I’m… not.” 

Poe looked around at all the tables, glaring at the few people who had already told him to can it. “Why?” 

“I don’t know. I think I just did it because I was jealous.” 

“Jealous?” 

As much as he hated to sound like Sadie, he said: “Of Finn, you know. The new guy? The guy I talked to you about who lent me his expensive cologne?” 

“Oh,” Poe hummed, and then louder. “_O_ _ h _ , yeah.” He patted Ben on the back. “You don’t stand a _ chance _.”

“But I did, though—I _ do, _” he insisted. Bazine was delighted at his show of affection, and if Poe had really seen it like he said he did, then Ben wouldn’t have to explain it here again. 

“Oh, yeah? What’re you going to do to ask Bazine out? Do you remember Allen?” 

Of course. “Who could forget him?” Allen was Bazine’s first boyfriend in Alderaan. They dated in middle school, a point in Ben’s life when all he wanted to know was why his facial hair grew sideways. 

Allen left Alderaan before he reached high school because they had to, his father’s business was expanding and their small town was not big enough for the plans they had in mind. No one really remembered much about Allen, but it was Ben who deliberately erased memories of him. Ben knew what Poe was talking about. For the past couple of years, Allen always asked Bazine out in bizarre, very public ways, even when every adult in the building felt uncomfortable about it. It never became anything inappropriate, of course; Ben actually felt that all the publicity stemmed from the merits of the dating status. Popular kids liked keeping up appearances, and Bazine and Allen’s thing always felt like that to him. 

Poe snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “It’s either you top Allen or this guy gets all the girls without even doing anything. What bleak options.” 

Public, grandiose stunts for romance points didn’t sound like something rational Ben would agree with, but he knew it was the only way to cement her place by Bazine’s side. Whatever it was he’d end up doing, it was necessary, and a very real consequence of his equally-public display of affection, which a big part of him still wished he hadn’t done. 

Poe sensed his anguish and had no qualms poking fun at it. “I’m _ so _looking forward to this.” 

“Shut up,” Ben groaned, collecting his book as everyone shuffled for the next class. Poe sidled next to him, another attractive human male he frankly did not need right now. This… this walking reminder that he will probably always be the guy with the big ears and Poe would always be the high schooler who could somehow rock a hint of a scruff and still be attractive. And how was it that everyone seemed to gain many favors from the awkward years of puberty and all he got was armpits that sweat when he didn’t want them to and facial hair that grew from the bottom of his narrow chin upwards? Why couldn’t he have had those strong, muscular, sufficiently broad shoulders that Finn had that made the girls go wild? 

As if on cue, Poe slapped Ben’s shoulder with the back of his hand and pointed to the direction of the entrance where Rey was silently rocking on her heels. “Isn’t that your jacket?” Poe asked, followed by, “is that… Rey? Rey’s wearing your jacket.” 

“She’s got a cold,” Ben said with finality, implying that if Poe were to run a joke with this, he wouldn’t like it. But before Poe could say a thing, before Ben could focus on anything else, Finn came bounding down the hall again, all swift and muscular gracefulness. His hands looked too big on Rey’s back when he placed it there and dragged it down to wrap around her small hand. 

He’d held that hand, too. 

“What’s going on, are they dating?” 

“No,” his answer came out without warning and it had a hard edge to it. “No, I don’t think so.” 

But he was doubting it as he watched them go, hand-in-hand, their footsteps in lockstep as they reached the sidewalk outside. Maz came by on a beat-up old pick-up truck with a wide, grateful smile on her face as she looked on Finn and then Rey, the latter she then huddled inside the car and drove presumably home with. The exchange was probably no longer than sixty seconds, but it felt to Ben like a lifetime had passed. 

She was still wearing his jacket, he told himself, and he was only jealous of Finn because _ all _ the girls liked him; it wasn’t _ just _ Rey. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Outro: [Circles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXhTHyIgQ_U) by Post Malone 
> 
> I’m going to write in Rey’s POV soon; what chapter do y’all think I’ll start? o u o


	10. Sappho 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They moved their arms around, stomped unceremoniously and everything was wildly out of sync, even their breathing. Ben’s heart pounded like he was marathoning, but his face hurt from the wide smile he was sporting that mirrored Rey’s.
> 
> In the back of his mind, he wondered if maybe he should write a piece about this, but he didn’t feel that was right. This was the type of thing you felt but didn’t pause to write or think about. It was a moment frozen in time that lived better in memory than in paper. It was an experience stronger than words. 
> 
> It’s like Sappho said—or what she didn’t say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I would like to apologize for the irregular updates lately; life has been such a beeyotch. I’m still going through some IRL things so updates might continue to be this way but they will still come. Thank you for your patience, in advance! <3 
> 
> Another important thing: As I outlined the rest of the story, it become clear that I will not be completely remaking Flipped (sorry!) but rather will only be taking certain elements of the movie and the book. I hope this fact does not make you guys like the story any less. I will still be keeping the naive points-of-view from the characters and will be writing in the same spirit and feel as Flipped but I will be adding different things in the mix. 
> 
> For instance, I will be diving deep into some of the side character’s lives and struggles through single-chapter expositions dedicated to them. I will try to focus the side-stories in these single chapters and post them alongside major chapter updates so that those who want to skip it have the option to do so by proceeding with the rest of the story. 
> 
> If you like this idea then let me squeal with you because I’m so excited to do them! And if so, whose side character’s life are y’all curious to see first? o u o 
> 
> Mood music for this chapter: ["Just Like Heaven"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3nPiBai66M) by The Cure (A friend got me hooked on The Cure so here we are!)

Before he got lucky with admitting his feelings to Bazine, Ben’s approach to women had always been to _ not _ approach them. He had neither the confidence nor the looks to do that. In middle school, he was part of a subset of boys who grew up fast but fell short of _ growing up _ . He remembered the presence of a beard very vividly, the small waspish hair on his upper lip that legitimately got him excited for a little bit. But then the sweating began, and it didn’t end, and suddenly he was sprouting hair in parts of his body that had been baby smooth before. His voice was cracking, his hair was becoming unruly, his legs wouldn’t stop growing, he had body odor _ all the time _—suffice it to say, he became everything he knew no girl wanted. 

The admission to Bazine was an attempt at a semblance of confidence. His hope—aside from finally feeling Bazine’s soft black hair between his fingers, her soft lips against his—had been that surely, getting with the most undeniably confident girl in school might just make him confident, too. And he thought he’d been doing a great job. 

He wasn’t. 

Since informing him in no uncertain terms that she wanted everything he planned for her to be public. Bazine loved gestures, she loved men on their knees in front of her and making sure she knew these flowers were for her and her alone. She attracted so much attention from everyone that the school board even had to limit the amount of flowers taken inside the school, namely because those who had allergic rhinitis would sneeze almost on cue whenever someone tried to get in Bazine’s good side. 

He focused on that: Roses, the most male-gift-to-a-woman ever. What could go wrong? All that’s left was to figure out where to get the roses, when to get them, how to keep them fresh, how many to get, how red the petals have to be—was he even allowed to bring it inside the school building? Should he keep a sprayer around in case it somehow wilts just from being exposed to the halls of his high school? And why were there so many variables all of a sudden? 

He sighed, running his fingers through his hair in agitation. His house before him grounded him somewhat, and the realization that beyond that threshold and inside her study sat his very discerning mother. So maybe asking his mother for advice might feel embarrassing, but if he were to choose between his parents, his mother seemed like the obvious choice. 

“Mom?” He called once inside, walking straight into the kitchen and rummaging around the fridge for something to drink. “I’m home.” 

He decided on OJ. He put the box on the counter next to a glass and waited for Leia. He took out another glass as she came to view her glasses hanging around her neck. 

“How was school, dear?” She asked, pouring them both a glass. Ben shrugged, subconsciously feeling the weight of his non-existent hoodie on his bony shoulders. Right. 

“It was fine.” He bit his lip. “Mom, can I ask you something?” 

Leia raised a brow, tilting the glass of OJ into her lips. “Hm?” 

“See, I want to, uhm, surprise this girl. I want to take her to the dance but I want to make sure she knows that I care and so I have to surprise her. Should I get flowers? What flowers should I get? Should I—“ 

Leia choked slightly on the drink and the look she had on was… funny. “Mom, I’m serious,” he added, gross overcompensation, really; he was already pretty embarrassed he had to do this, but what choice did he have? 

“Alright, alright,” she smiled. “I’ll get a notebook.” 

“What? Why?” 

“We have to write you down some verses. It’ll impress her, I promise. Your father was a skeptic before he started reading the bible and I was single before he started reciting the verses to me.” 

“Verses? Why would I need verses, mom?” 

There might have been a misunderstanding, because as his mother turned around to fix him with a searching stare, he could have sworn his fight or flight instinct came in. 

“I mean,” he hastily continued, “what makes you think this girl in particular likes to be wooed with, uhh, verses?” 

Leia still looked puzzled, turning the question around in her mind before she asked: “Aren’t you gonna take that artist girl out, Rey? The kids at church like her a lot. I remember you talking to her yesterday.” 

“No, no,” he chuckled, wondering why Rey was somehow the topic of another conversation she was not even present for. “Rey’s just a friend—it’s for Bazine, this girl I’ve been meaning to impress since middle school.” 

“Has it worked so far?” 

“What?” 

“The impressing.” His mother’s eyes twinkled, her incisive and often too subtle sense of humor peaking through. 

Ben was losing count of all of the sighing he’d been doing, like he was some sort of perpetually deflating balloon. “N-no— that’s why I need your help. I don’t want to ask dad.” 

As a part of this family, Leia understood why that was, cutting Ben some slack and inviting him over to the couch while she sat down in the armchair. 

“So you want to impress a girl… I honestly thought we were going to have this talk when you were 15.” 

“Thank god we didn’t,” Ben blanched, embarrassed; Leia laughed it off. 

“What do you want to give this girl?” She asked, the question so broad that it felt almost impossible to answer. He tried anyway, he needed this. 

“I, uhm, I wrote her some poetry that I would like to read to her.” 

Leia nodded slowly. “Alright. Anything else?” 

“Dad taught me how to play the guitar. I’m a little rusty but I think I remember a few chords from some songs, though I can just look them up on the internet.” 

She hummed. “What about what she wants to receive?”

Ben hadn’t really thought about that. Bazine seemed to only want to receive attention in any way, shape or form. He hadn’t really asked her. She was so popular it felt like everyone knew who she was, like they could stand her in the middle, have everyone in school draw up a list of what they thought about her and her life and most of their bullet points would match up perfectly. The question threw him off a little, though; what _ did _she like? 

The absolute worst case scenario was that he was going to do something that Bazine didn’t like, simple as that. Except she wasn’t really that much of a challenge, if Ben was being honest. Everything about Bazine seemed to be just mysterious enough that she could call people out for potentially invading her privacy and open enough that everyone knows to steer clear away from her if she doesn’t want them. 

If he remembered correctly, Allen was a standard thoroughfare kind of guy—flowers, chocolates, very, very public slightly-gross-for-their-age kisses. Ben was none of those things, he was a poetry-writing, lanky young man who wanted nothing more than to reach a goal that he was now actively regretting. 

But he was a man of his word; it was one of the actually good advice his father gave him, the only one in recent memory Ben could safely say even his mother agreed with. 

The motivation he got from that single advice helped him tide over his mother’s questions, saying, “I’m not Allen, her last boyfriend, and I don’t want to be. I want to try and offer her something different. I already have the poems but I don’t know how I can… you know… _ execute _ them. Does that make sense?” 

Leia nodded sagaciously, “It does. Hmm. Why don’t you tell her a poem about the things you like about her or something in that fashion. Might work.”

“How?” 

“That’s up to you, Benny. I don’t know this girl. But if you feel strongly enough about her that you’re willing to go above and beyond to make her happy, then there must be a lot of things you like about her.” 

Here is where Ben drew a blank. He liked that she was pretty—very pretty—but… what else? 

* * *

Mr. Dameron always said having a music class was pointless. Which was exactly why Poe signed up for one. Ben wasn’t sure why Poe liked challenging his father as much as he did. It wasn’t like his father hated it. He was the brand of Boomer who quite liked his son making decisions for himself he might not necessarily agree with. 

Ben probably had to thank Poe more than ever for his spunk in this regard; if not for him, Ben wouldn’t have found the perfect three-chord progression to go with his fall dance song. 

Poe cleared his throat, tapping his fingers against the frets. “You’re serious about this? I’ll need to ask Paige later today if we could borrow the amp for your big gesture but I honestly can’t promise you anything beyond that.” 

“That’s good enough, I guess.” Ben replied, toying with the pen in his hand. He’d drafted a couple of verses last night and teased out a few chords on his dad’s ancient guitar to create a melody, though it was rudimentary at best. Then he called Poe and played it to him over the phone, to which he got an initial seal of approval, only if Poe got to hear the rest of the song in person just before school tomorrow. It meant Ben had to drop by an hour early at Poe’s for a practice run. 

It went about as well as they both expected, which was to say not well at all. Ben easily forgot the lyrics, and Poe laughed at him every time he did. He was beginning to think this might not work at all and that maybe his mother was right; what _ did _ Bazine want? And was asking for it going to ruin his chances? Wasn’t he supposed to know this? 

It was too late for that anyway; he’d already thrown himself headfirst into a public, irreversibly high-risk situation. He sensed most _ everyone _ at school knew that if he didn’t succeed, he ran the risk of losing everything he had with Bazine. It wasn’t particularly thrilling to be thrust in a situation where the odds are tipped uncomfortably _ against _your favor. 

Bazine made no mention of it, though, although anyone with eyes could see that Heather and Sadie and everyone else were looking forward to what he was going to do. Maybe Bazine just liked the attention without acknowledging it. It’s probably her detachment that made her cooler. 

“Sooo, homecoming is in two days, whatcha got planned?” Heather asked, brown hair swaying as she walked in that flouncy, bouncy way. Sadie was equally invested in what he had to say, jaw working on a piece of gum. 

Ben swallowed, the usually familiar weight of Bazine’s bag growing heavier on his shoulder. He looked at Bazine who was obviously still flaunting faux indifference. “I— I plan for it to be a surprise.” 

“A surprise, eh?” Heather needled. “Is it Instagram-worthy?” 

“Instagram— god, I hope not.” 

This caught Bazine’s attention. “Well, why not?” 

“I— uhh. I just want it to be like, between the two of us, you know?” 

Heather doubled over with suppressed laughter while Sadie gave him a toothy grin. “Between the two of you? You better make sure you know what you’re talking about, boy, or you’ll be standing in Allen’s shadow forever.” 

Heather’s final words faded and the threshold to Bazine’s first class came into view. Sadie and Heather split off and Bazine took her bag in her hand with enough grace to make his heart seize. 

Today, she was probably feeling a little sassy, because the wink she gave him was cheeky enough to break a grown man’s heart, but to Ben was just this wonderful little thing. 

He wondered if Bazine was ever going to do something unforgivable to him; if she was ever going to morph into a person he did not like. He was still convinced that she was just acting out because of being deeply misunderstood, that she was going through her own stuff like the rest of them, even though that was hard to believe. 

So for the entirety of his first class, he racked his brain for something poignant to say to her, something deliberately thoughtful besides just calling her pretty. Ben was sure she’d heard that said since forever; it was time for a little rebranding. 

For once, he was thankful that Rey was not in his first class today. She was proving to be a bigger and bigger distraction as time passed and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it. But then gym class came along and all he could focus on was that built jock Finn’s effortless male bravado—and Rey’s continued absence. 

How did it get to this point? He was too busy drumming up the perfect way to ask Bazine to the dance, he didn’t need all this extra nuisance in his head. 

But even as he’s finishing up an almost-decent chorus for his little stunt, he glimpsed their Sappho homework sticking out of his binder and decided to give in to his curiosity.

* * *

The pub looked different from the front, now that it wasn’t haloed by a frame of a hedge of green leaves. From this angle, it was bigger, made of red brick with mood lighting spilling out from beyond the wrought iron retro-style doors, wood and overlain with ornate grills. It smelled like cheap beer and sweat. Notes of lavender floated around in minute traces, but whoever made the effort to freshen up must feel absolutely useless at this point. The countertop of the bar area accommodated two salt-and-peppered hair gentlemen with their heads bobbing to some Phil Collins over the sound system. 

Maz was standing out front, back against the door and dragging on a cigarette. She saw Ben approaching and stubbed her cigarette out with her booted feet, smelling strongly of nicotine as she drew close to gesture a hand for him to lean down. Her breath smelled ashen, but it was the smile she wore that made him overlook it. 

“Come to visit us again, Ben Solo? Who are you planning to spy on this time around?” 

He cringed. He probably deserved that. He might have apologized to Rey about it, but not to Maz.

“I’m really sorry about that, Mrs. Kanata. It won’t happen again.” 

Maz took a long, hard look at him from head to toe, before slowly saying, “What brings you back here, then?”

It was like a switch was turned on inside him—he perked up and rooted around in his bag for a pad. “I’m here for Rey. She was absent from school today and I just wanted to make sure she was okay.” He shrugged. “And I guess I just wanted to make sure this Sappho paper can be finished today so we can submit it tomorrow.” 

The other kids who walked by the bar or met Maz on Sundays at the local church would always say that she had an unsettling way of looking at people. She didn’t fidget or fumble; she didn’t squirm even when she was looked down on, which, for her height, was quite often. Instead, she looked on with such a commanding gaze. Was she examining him? Putting him under a microscope? Is she going to ask him of his intentions with Rey? 

Before it could come to that, Rey popped up in the doorway of the pub, carefree with her messy top-bun and baggy sweatpants. She was holding a bag of pretzels in one hand and chewing a dismembered one on the other. She alternated her gaze between her mother and Ben, who was already sweating under his shirt again. 

Rey eyed him curiously, her thin, pink lips pressed together. “Hello, Ben,” she said, an instant smile on her lips. 

He swallowed. “Hello, Rey. I was just… I wanted to know if you were alright. You didn’t go to school today.”

“I was sick.” 

“Are you okay now?” 

“I’m feeling better,” she said, jutting her arm out to him. “Pretzel?” 

“I’m good.” 

Maz excused herself around this time, watching the exchange with an odd ghost of a smile before stalking off back to the bar. Rey watched her go before turning to Ben. 

“So what’s up?” She asked, discerning that there was definitely more to this visit. 

“I, uhh, brought the Sappho homework with me. The submission is tomorrow so I kind of wanted to drop by so we could finish it.” 

Her eyebrows raised as she nodded vigorously, eyes darting to something in the pub that Ben couldn’t see himself. 

“Do you want to come up?” She asked slowly. 

“Sure,” came his instant response, and Ben had always seen her smiling before, but now he was witnessing the wonder of seeing it form from nothing, the simple act of this simple exchange manifesting itself on her face. 

Rey skipped happily inside the bar and he hastened to follow her lead. She smiled and greeted rednecks, leather-clad bikers on the pool table exchanging bets, and tough-looking women about Maz’s age fueled by bitterness over their failed marriages. She led him up a narrow staircase tucked away beyond the busy kitchen, high-fiving and greeting each person by name. It was like a very big family and Rey was that relative who always got everyone presents. 

They finally reached the top of the staircase just as Phil Collins stopped singing about how you can’t hurry love. Then “Against All Odds” came on. 

Her room was small and rustic. The walls were made of the same red brick, a tiny bookcase made its home pressed up cozily against the wall beside a dresser with its top drawer open. Her clothes, strewn on the bed, had no rhyme or reason, but what caught his attention the most was the cable running from the top of her window to the top of the door. There was a small step-ladder there beside what looked like a small desk overflowing with textbooks, trays of paper, and at least 50 different pens in terms of size, shape, color, and design. 

Hung on the cable were watercolor paintings left to dry on one of those thick specialty papers. On the floor under it was the watercolor set he assumed she used to paint them, lying out in the open and making Rey feel embarrassed. 

“Sorry about the mess,” said Rey, gathering the pens in her hands and fitting them in a little plastic pen holder with a glossy painting of a sunflower on it. It looked handmade. 

Maz then bellowed from the pub downstairs just as someone turned the volume down a little on Phil Collins’ desperate pining. “Rey, sweetie, call me if you guys ever need anything, alright?” 

Rey shouted back, “Alright, Mom!” 

Then she turned to him like she was weighing something in her head, the slight clenching of her hands that Ben ordinarily didn’t notice even alluded to this fact. He didn’t notice things like that with her before, and it felt weirdly nice to notice them now, like she was trusting him with something she didn’t realize was steadily becoming important to him. 

Rey sat in the middle of the room and urged him to do the same thing, tapping the floorboard. She pushed her paint materials over to the side and stood up to procure two throw pillows from her bed, then she offered him one and laid with her belly on the floor, her elbows braced on the pillow. 

Ben followed her down, before assembling their papers on the floor and handing her a pen to scribble her thoughts with. She asked why he was encouraging her to doodle on the margins of their document, but he said he’d just rewrite it when he got home. 

“Oh,” she said, looking at the paper. “I forgot how pretty your handwriting was.” 

“It’s not pretty. It’s just legible.” 

“Same thing,” she teased. 

“It’s not, though.” 

“Whatever you say.” There it was again; she tried to make it sound like her usual confident self, but more and more Ben could tell she was struggling, why that was Ben could not figure out, so he followed the path of least resistance. 

“So, Sappho.” 

“Yep.” 

“All we need is an exposition in the middle and maybe a conclusion, you got anything?” Distraction was a good way—an _ amazing _way, actually—for Ben to tear himself away from the… closeness he felt with Rey right here beside him, and those beautiful brown eyes that always appeared to hide a secret. 

After a while she spoke, the prior nervousness melting away as she, too, decided to focus on the task at hand. 

“This is the Sappho 31, right?” 

“Yes.” Ben initially thought this was going to be a bad choice to analyze, what with its short length. He’d hoped to choose something longer so they could maybe get into the meat of things, really dig deep and explain what could possibly be going on in Sappho’s head. But Rey had insisted on this one, she latched onto it the moment she read it on the textbook, this fragment, this slip, this glimpse of a poem. 

“I liked this one,” she began, “because it felt genuine to me.” 

“How so?”

“See, this one’s a fragment, right?”

“Almost all her surviving works are either fragments or have been changed by other poets.” 

“Right. Well, this one is a fragment, but it’s like a good fragment.” 

Puzzled, Ben blinked at his paper and blinked up at Rey, who was slowly cracking a small smile without looking at him, processing what she was about to say. 

“It felt sincere to me because… that’s exactly what it feels like to watch someone be so, so _ enamored _ with someone else. It may have just been a fragment but it’s so clear and concise and true that you don’t even notice that.” 

He… hadn’t thought about that before. Ridiculous, he knew, because he did the same thing, this hazy act of randomly recording his thoughts. 

Ben took the pen and positioned the paper close to him, nodding to Rey. “Would you mind expounding on that?” 

Rey’s mouth twisted, the perky little bun of hair atop her head bobbing as she returned his nod. “What Sappho says here is relevant for us to understand the gravity of her attraction, but what she _ doesn’t _say also gives us an indication of her feelings, even though all we can do is guess.” 

“You’re losing me.” 

“Here, let me borrow your textbook.” 

So he handed it to her, his long, bony elbow hitting the floorboard a little as he went. He rubbed at his skin. A rhythmic tap brought his attention back to Rey, who was staring seriously at the words on the page. His gaze fixed back on the smattering of freckles over her nose which he could now see—despite the shadow cast by the bright overhead light on her face—also occupied the skin under her eyes, faded little spots huddling underneath her eyebrows and extending like a halo around her forehead, near her hairline. They peeked out from behind some of her baby hairs, too, cheeky little things. 

Before he realized it, he chuckled smally, before clearing his throat again when she perked up at the sound. 

“What?” She asked, punctuated by yet another eyebrow furrow that really had no business looking that endearing. 

He cleared his throat again. “It’s nothing. You were saying?” 

“Oh, yeah, so, Sappho 31 is about jealousy, right?” 

“Yeah.” 

“The best part about it is the mystery about what comes next after that last part: ‘I am already dead, or little short of dying.’” Rey encircled the line. “It sounds like a reasonable conclusion already, and some might even say it was an ‘okay’ fragment over all, but I also have this opinion that maybe, the fragmentation of her work is as much a part of her poetry and should be appreciated as much as if it were a complete piece. It’s what we no longer see that she says that gives the words more weight.” Here she was the one who cleared her throat, twiddling with the pen in her hand. “Do you, uhm, get what I’m saying?” 

Ben knew that look, knew it all too well—the painful grip of insecurity that plagued almost everyone at school. Some were better at hiding it than others, he realized, because he thought maybe that was the reason why she seemed so confident at school and so different here. 

“Yes, I do,” he assured her. “I think that’s actually a really good analysis. It’s honestly the first time I’ve heard about it.” 

“Really?” Her eyes sparkled like stars. 

“Yeah,” he chuckled, caught off-guard by the beauty in her smile. “I’m a dumbass.” 

“None of that,” she snapped her fingers, pouting at him. “You’re not dumb for not knowing that. Sometimes you just need a new perspective.” 

“I guess you’re right,” he replied, settling into writing her input in the paper. As he did so, she rolled over to her back and hummed along to the music of the bar, which has since changed to… Rick Astley. It was a quiet moment, an unassuming moment, but Ben could see her laughing along as she hummed the words, he could see her amusement, so plain and apparent on her face he imagined sharing it. When the chorus came on, he did, singing along to the song and catching her attention. 

She turned back around, a toothy grin on her lips as they sang together. 

Ben didn’t expect to be _ rickrolled _ here, but it warmed his whole body to be in this moment with Rey, to just be… hidden away in her little world that he never particularly wanted to see until now; until now that all he wanted to do was stay inside it. During the second chorus run, they sang together again, Ben bobbing his head as he added the finishing touches to their homework. 

Rey got up and danced towards the end of the song, pulling him to his feet as the song gradually faded away. The song was so, so lame, he thought, not at all what he would go out of his way to listen to, much less _dance_ to. But it was so damn _catchy_, and Rey’s hands were so much warmer than he remembered, her smile so much wider than he was used to. And how could he say no to all of that? 

They moved their arms around, stomped unceremoniously and everything was wildly out of sync, even their breathing. Ben’s heart pounded like he was marathoning, but his face hurt from the wide smile he was sporting that mirrored Rey’s.

In the back of his mind, he wondered if maybe he should write a piece about this, but he didn’t feel that was right. This was the type of thing you felt but didn’t pause to write or think about. It was a moment frozen in time that lived better in memory than in paper. It was an experience stronger than words. 

It’s like Sappho said—or what she didn’t say. 

* * *

Ben went home that day still humming to Rick Astley. That was apparently too weird for his family, because as soon as Leia opened the door and heard him failingly imitate the synth sounds of the song, she quirked an eyebrow at him. 

“How was school? And why are you singing that?” Leia cut to the chase. Ben flashed her a small smile. 

“I heard it at the bar.” 

“The bar?” Leia asked, aghast. 

“It’s not like that, mom,” Ben quickly amended. “I just dropped by Maz’s to finish my homework with Rey and then the song came on and we started dancing and it just got stuck in my head.” 

“You? Dancing?” His mother intoned. Even Han looked like he was preparing himself for a punchline. 

“Mom, it’s not a big deal. The song was just catchy.” 

A few tense seconds later, Leia nodded, but Han’s expression remained the same. 

It shouldn’t be as big a deal as they were making it, so he rolled his eyes and excused himself to step inside the house, ignoring the heavy stare that followed him as he trudged up the stairs to his room, still humming merrily along. 

Ben was out of sight now but his parents stayed rooted by the door, unsure of what to do with this current development. Han looked at Leia first, and then up the stairs. 

“Our son, who fought an elder in the church when she asked him to join the dance troop, is… dancing?” The information had not quite settled in with them; it was all so strange. 

“Well, you heard what he said.”

“He could be lying.” 

“I get the feeling he isn’t.” 

“Dancing… and because of a girl.” 

“I know,” Han’s grisly chuckle sounded. “It’s always because of a girl.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ben is going to make a song.
> 
> Which means I will be making a song. 
> 
> *gulps*


	11. She Who Hung the Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben took one good look at that amp and was struck with the reality that this was really happening, that in a few hours from now, he was going to willfully embarrass himself in front of Bazine and the whole school under the guise of a romantic gesture. 
> 
> His mouth felt dry just thinking about the complete and utter rejection he’d surely feel if it turned out that Bazine was just dragging this out so that the rejection was more amusing. He hated that he had to think about that; it made everything harder, the pressure, and he almost wanted to travel back in time to meet his (much) younger self and remind him that no matter what happened at that water fountain, he was not to fall for the girl behind him, the cause of the immense stress he was in the right now. 
> 
> But this was reality—again, _so_ underwhelming—and reality did not bend for anyone but itself. So he picked up the guitar and amp, and tried his best to ignore Paige’s sardonic stare as he started plucking the chords.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I would just like to first apologize for the incredibly slow updates. My heart has been rather heavy lately, owing to the fact that Cosmic, as an irl person, gets into dumb, hurtful situations quite a lot. (Lol) All that pain has impeded my work on BTWT because I couldn’t get into the right headspace. 
> 
> I am slowly coming out of it, though, and I must say Star Wars IX being soooo close has been helping me a lot. For what it’s worth, I still decided to be on semi-hiatus on AO3 and Twitter just so I could sort these feelings out carefully. What that means is I will still be active on AO3 (posting, responding to your comments) but will not be as active as I was before, hence the long wait between chapters. I am deeply sorry! 😭 I hope you still love the stories that I’ll write, though, and that you guys will still support it!! 
> 
> Mood music for this chapter: [“Called Out in the Dark”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwTXwJg6_VE) by Snow Patrol

There was only so much you could do to manipulate words in order for them to suit the purpose you intended them to. Ben was slowly realizing it right now, a day before D-Day with Paige’s permission on the amp already freely given. That, in itself, led to additional pressure for him to do good; he was nervous now more than ever, now that it was sinking in that he was  _ really going to do this _ . Poe had texted him after he went to Rey’s place how everyone was waiting anxiously to see Heather’s Instagram Story on the dance, since that was just the kind of thing they all looked forward to in their grade. Heather was planning to record the whole thing, and since Bazine seemed to want that too, there was no disagreeing with Heather about it. All Ben could hope for was that he at least do well enough to pass the social media ideal guy test.

On the other hand, if he fucked it up, it would be on the internet forever and the internet never forgets. 

He could already hear Heather’s jeers when the day finally came, and it propelled him into a state of deep focus on this song he was still struggling to write since he was this boy now who just jumped in the line of fire of his own impulses, writing a  _ song  _ of all things. 

“Shit,” he mumbled to himself, stuck on a loop of scribbled words he’d been trying to to rhyme with the simplest word in the english language: You. This was all easier said than done, especially when it’s nothing but a three-letter word that had virtually no equal and yet sounded like so many other words. 

He’d managed to write down that first verse after three revisions (the final one sounded okay enough) and the pre-chorus seemed easy enough to tweak come the second chorus run (he was just thinking of replacing the words). He was doing his research at the same time, which, if he was being honest, was just an excuse for him to listen to some early Arctic Monkeys. But, hey, whatever helps, right? 

He hated that his voice was becoming too much of a baritone and that he had no control over it, hated it all the more because it was part of puberty and was therefore, something he couldn’t just wish away. It made every word sound clunky in his mouth, and, by extension, made his singing very, very unpleasant.  _ Great _ . Only the  _ whole school _ would be there to witness his catastrophic failure—oh, and every other person in the world with a stable internet connection and a basic understanding of the English language. 

_ Fuuuuck _ . He was going to go bad viral fast. People were going to call him names from across the globe and he wouldn’t even be able to defend himself and—he really should have thought this through. 

His forehead connected with the wood on his table while Robert Smith crooned in the background about Elise. If only he could be like The Cure, or any other songwriter alive, or just any rational person who has the presence of mind not to sing an original song to the girl he liked. Ben wanted so much to be that rational guy, except he wasn’t; he was just some dude staring at a piece of paper on the table so close that he was getting cross-eyed. He could smell the paper from here, too, could smell the ink. The words on the page blurred as he thought, groaning. He closed his eyes. 

Ben was going to write a goddamn song even if it killed him, bad viral or not, he would be there in the video, making the effort, and that would have to account for something. They might not see it now but this would be his biggest achievement. So, he leaned back and took a deep breath, furiously scribbling ill-fitting rhymes into an unrefined tune. 

* * *

Paige offered him the music room as soon as he came by an hour earlier than everyone else. The only ones around were members of the student council, who student council president Armitage Hux was currently herding into a room at the end of the hall, and Paige and Poe, who were setting up his amp for him. 

Ben took one good look at that amp and was struck with the reality that this was really happening, that in a few hours from now, he was going to willfully embarrass himself in front of Bazine and the whole school under the guise of a romantic gesture. 

His mouth felt dry just thinking about the complete and utter rejection he’d surely feel if it turned out that Bazine was just dragging this out so that the rejection was more amusing. He hated that he had to think about that; it made everything harder, the pressure, and he almost wanted to travel back in time to meet his (much) younger self and remind him that no matter what happened at that water fountain, he was not to fall for the girl behind him, the cause of the immense stress he was in the right now. 

But this was reality—again,  _ so _ underwhelming—and reality did not bend for anyone but itself. So he picked up the guitar and amp, and tried his best to ignore Paige’s sardonic stare as he started plucking the chords. 

Ignoring them was surprisingly easy, if not for Poe who kept drawing him back into his conversation with Paige, even though he was saying the words  _ at  _ Ben rather than  _ to _ him, like he was a mere specter. 

“So, how do you think he’d do, Paige?” Poe asked cheekily, the worst part being that he belatedly realized that they had positioned the amp and the guitar in the middle of the room so that Paige and Poe could sit close to the opposite wall and observe him like two The Voice judges. Paige worked her jaw, feigning thoughtfulness. 

“I don’t know, Poe. The boy seems dedicated but not  _ that _ dedicated, you know?” She drolled. 

Ben rolled his eyes. “I  _ can _ hear you, you guys know that, right?” 

“Just looks to me like a lovesick puppy, doesn’t he?” Poe ignored Ben’s protests, grinning wide as Paige responded with a slow nod of her head, as if in thought. Ben rolled his eyes again. He might as well take it out. How had he not noticed that Paige was like a girl version of Poe? But then he noticed the jacket Paige was donning, a rich maroon varsity jacket like the one the guys on the football team wore. Figures. She did look like the type of spunky that the jocks liked.

Just then, what looked like a tiny human entered the room, barrelling right in with her short, cropped hair and thick-rimmed glasses. She was smaller than both Paige and Poe but her smile was beaming. She was holding her bag tightly around her shoulders, her fingers curled securely around the straps. 

“Hey, Roseeey,” Paige greeted. 

“Don’t call me that,” Rose whined, but her lifted spirits didn’t change. “And why did you take my jacket?” 

So the jacket was Rose’s. Strange. Whatever. It wasn’t Ben’s business. He picked up the guitar and started to focus on his piece, choosing to hum it to himself. Blessedly, the exchange of the jacket distracted Paige enough that her oppressing attention to his fumbling lessened; Poe, too, started to talk to Rose, which was probably weirder than the fact that Rose was in possession of a varsity jacket. Poe hated the student council, always said they were just a bunch of pencil-pushers with human-length sticks up their asses—this, a term he reserved only for Hux, the president, who he claimed he strongly hated but never stopped talking about, whenever someone so much as brought up anything related to the student council in any way. 

He had no time to think about high school politics right now—he was single-minded in his quest to woo the girl at the top of the high school food chain, and that was a much different kind of stress. If he could, he’d much rather not have  _ any _ kind of stress right now, at least until the stress turning his stomach could finally go away. 

Alas, the universe had other plans, because as soon as he finished his first run of the song, a voice he’d recognize from a mile away—from worlds and galaxies away—filtered through the door. 

“Rose? Are you there?” Rey asked, cautiously letting herself in. She looked passive, a little sleepy, but a smile formed on her lips when her eyes landed on him. “Hey, Ben! What are you doing here?” 

Rose, apparently, was curious too, waiting for his answer along with the eternally amused faces of Paige and Poe. All of them were looking at him, but only Rey and Rose had genuinely curious expressions, so he focused on them instead. Scratch that—only at Rey. His fingers twitched over the strings and he hastily laid it flat on the belly of the guitar, trying to ground himself in the moment before flying off the handle at the chokehold of anxiety he felt was beginning to form in his throat. 

“I’m practicing. For the dance.” He struggled for words. Rey looked visibly confused and Ben just wanted to punch Poe in the face for smiling like  _ that _ ; it told him that he was probably blushing to the tip of his giant ears again—and for  _ what _ ? Rey was just a girl. If she noticed, she didn’t say. Or maybe she did but didn’t think much of it? 

Slowly, her eyes lit up and her smile grew wider. “Are you going to play at the dance?” 

Poe cut in. “Yeah, are you, Ben?” 

Ben glared at him. “Shut up, Poe. And,” his eyes softened at Rey, “no, I’m not. Not at the dance, at least. But this… it’s how I’ll ask Bazine to the dance.” 

Assuming Bazine said yes. Ben hoped she would. His mounting anxiousness forced him to get back on the chords as soon as possible, his mind crying out for him to keep practicing so he doesn’t completely bomb this performance. Away from his line of vision, he didn’t catch the shadow that seemed to fall on Rey’s face before she schooled it into something different, the latter the only thing he glimpsed when he looked up again at the sound of her voice. 

“Can I hear it?” Rey asked, so softly he almost didn’t pick up on it. The change was so miniscule, one might even call it subtle, but Ben noticed it, as much as he noticed Rose’s earlier blinding smile becoming dimmer. 

Damn. If Rose—the most appreciative person Ben has probably ever known, even in passing—felt this much doubt in what he was going to do, what would the whole school think? 

But his mission was more important, a few hours from now he could pull off this thing or he could flop it, his best bet was to take all this attention he was getting as challenges. He should be able to take on a few stares from his (mostly) friends to know he could take on some more. So, with awkward, jerky movements, he began strumming the guitar on the three-chord progression Poe provided and tried to think of something to focus on as he sang. 

It was Rey who asked if he could do another run so he chose to look at her, at her cute little freckle-dusted nose, and the smile-lines forming in the corner of her eyes as she encouraged him to continue. 

He cleared his throat for the nth time this week, taking a deep breath. 

His voice wobbled on the notes like it was just finding its footing. That frustrated him because he’d been humming this song to himself since he started writing it, and now it all suddenly felt more nerve-wracking somehow. He looked at Rey as he sang the song. 

“Has anyone told you / Went out and gave you / 

More reason to smile, when / You give me a mile when I sit down beside you / Oh, baby, you’re so good—“ he paused, his slippery fingers messing up the chords in his nervousness, but it was Rey’s encouraging smile that kept him going. And really, who cared that Poe and Paige were snickering or that Rose was grinning in a funny way he didn’t understand? Rey was the only supportive one out of all of them. After that, it became fairly easy to continue the rest of the song; Ben might even say he became good at it towards the end. 

“This song is a prayer / Through my words, feel no failure / I’ve been scared for a lifetime /  But I know that it is time… 

“Would you take my hand?” He warbled, looking at Rey and trying to think if Bazine would ever look the same, if she’d have the same intensity and brightness in her smile that Rey had now. It was a wonderful thought. “Baby, won’t you be mine?—“ 

His thoughts were cut short when Paige clapped her hands together rather loudly, though, and as she looked at the people in the room, she announced that the rehearsal would have to be postponed for now. Classes were starting. 

Ben followed Poe as he moved around the room, rearranging chairs and clearing tables. Over his shoulder, he saw that Paige had taken care of the amp and was putting it close by the door so he she could pick it up quick for later and bring it to him at the canteen. Rose and Rey had already left the room the instant Paige announced that they should be getting back, Ben knew because she gave him a thumbs up before she left and mouthed ‘You can do it’ just before crossing the threshold and fully disappearing. 

“Poe, hey, thanks for this,” he said, awkwardly gesturing to the guitar still slung around his neck. Poe tugged a desk closer to its seat pair and released a low chuckle. 

“You might want to remember making eye contact with Bazine later, buddy,” Poe replied, lifting his head up to check on Paige, who has now moved to wipe down the board. Ben blinked in confusion. 

“What do you mean? Of course I’ll look at Bazine. Why wouldn’t I look at her?” Why would that even be a suggestion in the first place? The song was for her, not anyone else. 

But Poe, with a knowing smirk on his lips, looked like he was the informant who knew more than he let on, and that today was the day he let everyone know he did. 

“You tell me,” he said, brushing past Ben to the front of the class and turning back only for the smirk to still be there. “Because I’ve seen the way you look at Bazine in the many years I’ve known you- but the way you looked at Rey a while ago?” 

“What?” 

Paige found a way to sneak back in the conversation then, and judging from the knowing glint in Poe’s eyes, they agreed on what she observed. 

“Like she hung the stars,” she said. 

* * *

When your default setting as a person rotates between confused, nervous, and slightly-more-nervous-but-still-trying-to-function, you assume that you already know nervousness and anxiety. You think you are already so bombarded with these emotions that you can just roll with the punches and try to move on. 

Older Ben would have a probably better understanding of managing anxiety as the Ben now, who was standing in the middle of the canteen even after he insisted he was fine just standing a few inches from the far wall of the canteen partially obscured from the students. 

But no. 

Someone had to arrange something with the canteen staff so that a table is cleared in the middle of the room. And Paige just strolled right in like it was no one’s business, setting up the amp in the middle of the room because that was totally just the sense of humor she had.

Poe stood by as a crowd started to form, and Ben realized none of these people were watching him because they wanted to hear the song—they were all just waiting for it to fail. For Bazine to formally renounce her connections to him indefinitely. But he still had hope. And Ben supposed maybe Poe and Paige could feel that too, because they were still here. 

Poe found it delightful to tease people around him and plow through high school having the time of his life but when push comes to shove, he was reliable enough. It’s just that there’s this sneaky little side of him that thrived on his playful spirit more than the reliable one and—

Bazine walked right into the fray pretty easily. Everyone in school just gave her a wide berth at all times, and this time was one of the times they would gladly do it. It had Ben’s dignity on the line which was brutal for him but enjoyable to the rest of the school. 

Some of the students already had their phones out, which did absolutely nothing for his anxiety. He was one-hundred percent sure that Heather’s phone was already on standby on her Instagram story and was positioned at just the right angle to maximize his exposure. Bazine, in the middle of it all and just a few feet away from him, beautiful, condescending Bazine, smiled in that devious way she did. Not at all like Rey’s smile was, and he should have known that. But still, he hoped; he hoped this would finally be the moment his luck turned. 

All of them were waiting for him to either pass or fail; it felt a little like taking a test he studied for but still wasn’t prepared for. Just like that test, this needed to be dealt with and finished, so he took a deep steadying breath as he looked up at Bazine, stared as deeply as he could into her eyes and began singing. 

His voice cracked and he was sure that Heather caught that, too, caught his nervousness in its complete unfiltered glory—but he soldiered on. 

“Would you take my hand?” His trembling lips uttered, his teeth ready to clamp down in fear of rejection but he wanted to do this for himself for once, wanted to show himself he was capable of great things even though it was hard. 

“Baby, won’t you be mine?” there was no way they weren’t hearing the tremor in his voice, no way they weren’t detecting it from the way he was gradually whispering the lines to himself.  _ Focus, Benjamin, you can do this. _ But each time he looked between Bazine and his fingers on the guitar, all he felt was the pit in his stomach widening, the beads of sweat on his forehead collecting, and his fingers shaking from that impending doom, that expected rejection until—

Until he caught sight of a pair of wily arms waving from a corner of the room. It was like deja vu; the whole scene unfolded and he remembered how it was like the tithe prayer on the lectern all over again when Rey’s eyes shone so bright despite them reflecting gray that day. 

She smiled now, too, a little pained, but that was just because he assumed he probably wore that same expression. It screamed desperate, he knew, but Rey saw something in it that no one else in the room did despite their attentiveness, and just like that day in church, that tithe prayer that sparked his nerve endings with barely-contained nervousness, Rey became his savior. 

With absolutely no grace at all, she rose on her feet atop the chairs where no one could see her, her only companions Poe and Paige. Ben still had a bone to pick with them, but when it really came down to it, he knew he could always count on Poe. He supposed these were one of those moments, except Rey led the charge. 

She raised a piece of paper and glanced at it, and when she began mouthing words to him, everything felt well and truly like that tithe prayer day. And like that tithe prayer day, he trusted her with all his heart— all so he could sing it out to another girl. 

Slowly, Rey’s mouthed words flowed into him, followed the sound of his guitar as Ben stared at her in disbelief—she was singing along with him. She fed him the lyrics as he went on, making almost exaggerated little hand movements to encourage him to keep going. 

And so he did. Eventually he strummed with a little more confidence and sang with a little more gusto. By the end of the song, he could see that Rey was breathing rather heavily and giving him a thumbs up. Flooded with relief, he eventually turned his attention to Bazine, his anxiety now having disappeared, to find her actually… smiling. Genuine, honest-to-god smiling. Anyone else would have said this smile looked no different from the one she had on when Ben began his performance, but the fact that Heather and Sadie seem to be sharing the same smile gave him hope, filled him with so much happiness. 

Maybe… 

“Soooo,” Heather purred. “What’d you think, Bazzy? You gonna give this boy a chance?” 

If Ben were to describe the moment that passed after Heather asked that question, he would say it was coiled with so much tension that his bones felt like they would snap. Everyone at school was invested with Bazine’s life and endeavors like she was a member of the Kardashians. It’s a little like reality TV, Ben thought, especially since what had just happened was something very public and personal, two things that Bazine considered important with regards to wooing her. That was a set standard somehow, and as Bazine looked him over and over, he began to feel the weight of that standard resting like a hungry vulture on his shoulder, clawing at his insecurities inside to gut him in front of his waiting audience. 

But then Bazine smiled. And she continued smiling until the corners of her eyes wrinkled, and until Heather finally looked at him with what was almost like a genuine expression of awe. Sadie looked equally impressed, and the whole cafeteria was filled with uproarious glee from everyone in the room when Bazine said “Yes” like he’d just asked her to marry him. 

In his heart, it certainly felt that way; it felt that way because then—as if he were floating on a dream—Bazine came up to him to hug him, and he hugged back tighter than he’d probably ever hugged anyone before. In his joy, he looked up, up to the person who he knew made all of this possible, to the person who gave him enough confidence beforehand that it was a veritable wellspring of emotion now. 

He looked for Rey but she was already gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Outro music: [“A Letter To Elise”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLW22B5R3Mc) by The Cure

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: [cosmic-interference](https://cosmic-interference.tumblr.com/)  
Twitter: [cosinterference](https://twitter.com/cosinterference)


End file.
